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 SEVEN: MELBOURNE

7.1 Melbourne in general

Melbourne challenges and contrasts with the depiction of Sydney as the scenery and lifestyle centre of Australia's metropoli. Melbourne owes much of its image to its having developed so strongly during the reign of Queen Victoria. It had no immediate convict past to hurt the reputation of its residents, it was carefully surveyed and, with the coming of the Gold Rush, it had a healthy economy from which to grow.

By the twenties, however, the boomtime was long gone, the city's mercantile power had ebbed away after the 1890s depression. The grand architecture and gardens of the previous century now served as the backdrop to a more conservative society, having been created as signs of Melbourne's wealth they were now part of the its dowdiness. Rows of oaks and poplars in the parks and Italianate bank offices in the city gave the city an old world air. The portrayal of Melbourne came to consist of its man-made landscape rather than its natural situation and its people.

Unlike the Sydney production, Melbourne was not numbered as part of the Third Series of Art in Australia, although it was uniform with the journal's format. Instead it was sub-titled a Special Number of Art in Australia. Several of Melbourne's resident pictorialists, including John Kauffmann, present photographs of the city area.(below left)

Popular subjects include the Yarra and views from Melbourne's surrounding parkland. Melbourne's adherence to the pictorialist School's mistiness was stronger than Cazneaux's. Many of the images in the book are incredibly obscure. The photographers sought out views of city streets that portrayed the grand city architecture and Melbourne's parkland, the dark pictorialist effect rendering the latter as eerie grottos.

The Melbourne Book followed in 1931 as part of another Art in Australia Limited series. It reproduced many of the photographs that were featured in Melbourne of 1928. These were supplemented by clearer aerial images of the city, many of these were taken by George 'Airspy' Hansom for the Melbourne Herald.(below right)

The combination of the dark, brooding images of the twenties contrasts with Hansom's clear, defined photographs. The grid-like form of the city's streets contrasts the aesthetic of Melbourne with the Europeanised street scenes of ground level, with the dominating forms of very decorative Victorian-era buildings. The differing printing techniques of the photographers bring disunity to the book as dim, dark park scenes accompany crisp, light aerial landscapes.

E. O. Hoppe's The Fifth Continent, 1931, features two examples of Melbourne's emergent skyscrapers. One is of Collins Street, discussed later, the other is a photograph of the corner of Elizabeth Street and Collins Street. The Strand, a new Gothic/Art Deco building, dominated Elizabeth Street in Hoppe's photograph. It is seen between columns of the older (Collins Street) buildings, providing an architectural contrast.

Another contrast in the image is of Melbourne's transport, with shiny modern cars on Collins Street passing in front of Elizabeth Street's aging cable trams. The transport theme is also featured in the facing image showing the corner of Flinders Street and Swanston Street seen from Flinders Street Railway Station.

Commuters are pouring southwards across Flinders Street to catch their trams and trains home. In a parallel line a smaller crowd can be seen heading along on the opposite side of Swanston Street towards Prince's Bridge Station and the busy St. Kilda Road trams. The uniform order of the crowds heading south is interrupted by a cyclist heading north along Swanston Street. Cars complete the image but they are not yet a major part of the workers' lives.

Under contract to Georgian House to produce five books (starting with his autobiography I Can Take It in 1947), Jack Cato, with his son John, compiled his imagery of Melbourne that he had been working on since moving there in the twenties. From this he produced Melbourne in 1949.¹  Melbourne is a book of large tinted images, with little vignettes below some images to add to the subject.

Cato shows the city through photographs of individual buildings, with cityscapes used to show what Cato describes as the 'cubist' pattern of Melbourne's development. This cubism seen in a view of Melbourne's business district, revealing the flat planes of masonry and advertisements on the sides of buildings waiting for a neighbouring building to cover the space. (above - left)

It is also, perhaps due to Cato's background in the pictorialist tradition, the only book of Melbournian images to take advantage of the city's reputation for regular rainfall, with an image of a city street comer at night with the city lights reflecting in the rain and puddles. (above-right)

As a sequel to Portrait of Sydney, Rob Hillier was sent to Melbourne to compile a sister volume. Unlike Portrait of Sydney, however, Portrait of Melbourne lacks the investigation of the people of Melbourne. They appear as detail in images of the city streets, shopping in Bourke Street, going to the main theatres, lying on the banks of the Yarra, etc. but very few instances are given of the character of Melbourne's residents.

A section on the city's back lanes is the closest to Portrait of Sydney's populist approach. Instead, Hillier adds a section of colour photographs of the city, these images are most successful in illustrating the parks and the reflections in the Yarra River. The bridges on the modestly sized Yarra are shown as part of the Seine-like river scenery. As is common to most books on Melbourne, only the Prince's Bridge, in the centre of the city, is shown as a landmark on its own merits but Hillier's treatment of the other bridges was partly based on the bridges' histories.

Selection from Ure Smith's Portarit of Melbourne, 1951

Colour imagery of Melbourne also features in the early section of Frank Hurley's Victoria, A Camera Study, published in 1956. Emphasising Melbourne's commercial reputation, Hurley shows the crowds along the main streets. It is obvious from the various decorations that Christmas Shopping is underway. The colour photographs feature the bluestone buildings and parklands of the city. Hurley's eye for dramatic, monumental photographs is found here in photographs of the Shrine of Remembrance and State Parliament House. There are also aerial images of the city and a panoramic view of St. Kilda. Hurley follows the Mornington Peninsula beaches as a means of moving his coverage of Victoria from its capital city to its provinces.

Three images from Frank Hurley's, Victoria, A Camera Study, 1956

above: Collins Street, Melbourne        below: Bourke Street Melbourne

Melbourne, a Portrait, was published in 1960. In contrast to the previous books' uses of landmarks and panoramic views, the photography by Mark Strizic took a introspective approach, accompanied by a similarly personal poem written by David Saunders. As well as the use of poetry as a narrative, Melbourne, a Portrait was influenced by the style of the Family of Man catalogue in its design.

The phototext was soft covered with a cover design by Len French. Saunder's lengthy blank verse began with these explanatory lines,

Each man has in his heart
His own portrait of his city;
To discover this portrait is revealing,
For his city made him while he made his city^.2

The role of the individual is championed in this book. The crowds of shoppers and commuters in the city streets are featured in Melbourne, a Portrait in a different way to earlier books. Instead of general views of busy footpaths, the Melbumians are shown in action, window shopping, waiting for trams or sitting down for lunch.

	Under the Clocks, Flinders Street Station
Flinders Street Station Booking Office	Police HQ, from McKenzie Street
St. Paul's Cathedral Steps	A Sale on Bourke Street
Punch Lane	Buckley's
Tram-Stop	Town Hall corner
Bourke Street from Elizabeth Street	Flinders Lane from Elizabeth Street

click here for more of Melbourne, A Portrait

Most of the photographs feature only a few people.There is, as the poem suggests, a modernist approach to city life. Contrasts between the individual and the crowd are found in Nineteenth Century French writings by Baudelaire and Zola, and have influenced the photography of Walker Evans, Bill Brandt and Berenice Abbott to name just a few.

Rather than portraying Melbourne as seen by a tourist promenading along its broad avenues and through the Central Business District, Melbourne, a Portrait is Melbourne as seen by locals.³  This is Melbourne with its little back lanes, its failing road surface revealing the Nineteenth Century woodblocks, the cracked mosaic floor of The Block Arcade, etc. Landmarks are viewed from different angles.

An example of the differing viewpoints of landmarks is the Russell Street Police Headquarters. A rather non-descript governmental building of the forties, it was initially seen in full as the central subject of an image. In Melbourne, a Portrait it is seen from behind a terrace house, as a backdrop rather than on its own as an example of architecture and radio technology, as Sydney's similar A.W.A. Building was portrayed.⁴

Despite the Headquarters' presence in earlier books on Melbourne as a landmark, it would be a few years yet before the television series Homicide brought the building into Australia's living rooms. The back streets to the north of the city which feature as the foreground in Strizic's images were representative of the part of Melbourne then enjoying international fame through Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.⁵ 

While Strizic did not follow Cato in the portrayal of Melbourne in the rain, he does feature early morning mist and puddles in some images. His main reaction to Melbourne's wet image is humorous, one shopfront photograph features an advertisement for rain damaged goods.

The captions to the photographs in Melbourne, a Portrait are in English, German and Italian. Thus there is an indication of the effect of immigration on Melbourne's lifestyle. Strizic himself was German and Italians made up a large percentage of the non-English speaking immigrants of the time. The use of three languages points to the publishers' acceptance that Melbourne was home to a broad scope of people who did not necessarily identify with the conservative Anglo-Saxon image of Melbourne's past celebrated in past books.

With two Continental languages and a reputation for a European style, the city was confident enough, in the pages of Melbourne, a Portrait, to contrast itself with Vienna as well as the usual comparison between an Australian city and London through the use of maps showing the relative sizes and patterns of development, explained by Saunders's verse thus,

Its beginning was only yesterday,
yet already its suburbs spread as far as those of London.
In the Old World, where many centuries have shaped a city's form-history is plainly told by a map;
In Melbourne the Surveyor walked in front of progress.⁶

 

1. Jack Cato, The Story of "I Can Take It', Australasian Photo-Review, Volume LIV, Number 12, December 1947, Pp 79-81.
2. David Saunders, 'Melbourne a Portrait', from the book of that name, Melbourne, 1960. The lines echo the work of Australian poet Max Dunn,
   The country grows
   Into the image of the people
   And the people grow
   Into the likeness of the country
   Till to the soul's geographer
   Each becomes the symbol of the other.
   (Original source unknown, quoted in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Verse, Penguin, Melbourne, 1961, p. 172.)
3. Locals in the context of being a long-term resident of Melbourne. Jack Cato had lived in Melbourne for some time prior to the publication of Melbourne in 1949 but most other photographers, such as Frank Hurley and Rob Hillier, photographed Melbourne during brief visits. None of the above, including Strizic, were actually bora in Melbourne.
4. The difference between the AWA Tower and the Police Headquarters was that the latter's communications tower was designed for practical rather than decorative effect.
5. Strizic's photographs of the area featured in Lawler's play are not the only images in phototexts of the period which can be linked to the play's popularity, in Ziegler's Australian Photography 1957 a portrait of a kewpie doll seller by Kenneth Clifford brings the story to mind.
6. op cit 2.

 

7.2 Accidently Collins Street

There is no doubt that the section of Collins Street which gives the warmest glow to honest Melbourne hearts is the eastern end, usually called the top. Here on a hill a distincter and pleasanter character has emerged than you will find in many cities with so short a lifetime.

The building here is not pretentious; it forms a subdued and mercifully plain background to the opulent and well-established plane-trees which make it an avenue rather than a place of business. When autocrats decided to route Melbourne's particularly noisy electric trams through this section of the street, newspapers led an outcry against such vandalism.

The campaign was vigourous and fruitless; the trams came and they have made little difference. Paris is still Paris, in spite of the Eiffel Tower...This is the hilltop most favoured by photographers; over the brow of the hill the towers and pinnacles of the Block already show above the plane trees.¹

Every city has at least one view which is definitively its own self image. For Melbourne it was the view of Collins Street looking down the hill from Russell Street (either from street level or from the air).  When the Manchester Unity Building was built in 1932 it gave a new dimension to this image, towering over the City Hall which had been the previous centre of attention. Collins Street itself is the pride of Melbourne. Being the mercantile centre of the city, its architecture bears a conservative grandeur. Various areas of Collins Street were special for their individual appearance, particularly before modem architecture began to replace the distinctive regions with a more generic style. At the east end of the street, starting at the Treasury, is the tree-lined 'Paris End'. Between Swanston and Elizabeth Streets is 'The Block', where Melbourne's shopping precinct passes across Collins Street in its up market arcades. Further west is the 'Gothic' end, where Nineteenth Century investors celebrated Victoria's prosperity by loading their headquarters with decorations.

J.W. Eaton, Town Hall, Collins Street

The importance of Collins Street as an aesthetic centre for Melbourne was demonstrated during the late 1920s, about the time (1928) Art in Australia Limited produced Melbourne. At the time central Melbourne's elegant but aging cable tram system was being rebuilt as an electric tramway. As Geoffrey Hutton observed, Collins Street's professionals and the city's aesthetes joined in a newspaper campaign to prevent the conversion of the street's cable tramway, citing the overhead lines and the relative loudness of the replacement electric trams as a threat to the peace of Collins Street. In Melbourne, the pictorialist images of the cable trams moving along the street give the street an air of dignity.

E. O. Hoppe's The Fifth Continent, 1931, features an image of Collins Street, shows the beginnings of a skyscraper canyon, emphasised by the street's descent from Russell Street in the background. The majority of the visible buildings are from the nineteenth century and stand only a few stories off the street. Looming above them is a more modem tower, coming of a building otherwise uniform with the height of the neighbouring buildings. Conservatively decorated, the building contrasts with the busy Gothic and Italianate details of the Collins Streetscape.

Cato's photography of Melbourne's buildings was almost as important as his society portraiture. His photographs comparing the Classical and Gothic sections of Collins Street had been seen in several places, including The Home magazine. He featured the in his 1947 autobiography I Can Take It and then in 1949 they formed part of his architectural study in Melbourne. (top row below)

Rob Hillier's photographs of Collins Street in Portrait of Melbourne, 1951, include a page devoted to the four seasons.  His images are taken at the top (Paris) end, using the avenue of deciduous trees to denote the passage of time. (lower row below)

Mark Strizic's photographs of Collins Street in Melbourne, a Portrait (1960) show the street at close quarters. As with the rest of the book, the intent is an intimate viewing of the city rather than a grand vista. The Manchester Unity Building, instead of dominating the streetscape, appears as a Gothic folly behind a tree. This is the building seen as part of a walk along the street rather than carefully composed as an architectural landmark.

While the essential view of Melbourne was the aforementioned view of the Town Hall, the Prince's Bridge maintained a degree of popularity with Melbourne's image makers. Like the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in its day it was one of the world's widest bridges, it was built in an imitation of an English design (London's Blackfriar's Bridge rather than Newcastle-upon-Tyne's Tyne Bridge) and it was celebrated by the nation's avant garde painters.

Two images from Mark Strizic' Melbourne A Portrait

click here for a selection of Mark Strizic's Melbourne, A Portrait

1. Geoffrey Hutton, "Collins Street" in George Farwell and Frank H. Johnsons' This Land of Ours, Angus and Robertson, 1949.