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 EIGHT: OTHER CITIES

8.1 Canberra and the politics of being capital

Cazneaux photographed Canberra for The Home's special Canberra issue in May 1927 to celebrate the opening of Parliament and consequently the start of Canberra's role as Federal Capital.The following year Art in Australia Limited released a booklet incorporating some of those images.
Canberra shows the city as it was at the very beginning.
The centre of the city was the new but temporary Parliament House, only a few other substantial buildings had been completed at the time, most of them were for accommodation.

Emil Otto Hoppe's The Fifth Continent shows a very underdeveloped Canberra. A "still-bom child of jealousy and ambition", Canberra in the depression was stagnant.¹ There was not only the lack of funds but planning chaos as the residents succeeded in disposing of the Commission that had replaced Griffin during the twenties. Canberra is represented by three dull views taken in the vicinity of Parliament House, seemingly deliberate in showing the lack of cohesion in the partly built city.

The Site of Roman Catholic Cathedral, which appears to be where the west rose garden is today, looks from where there isn't a cathedral [to this day] across where there isn't a lake yet towards where there isn't much of a city centre.   At least Hoppe didn't show the workers' hostels in any detail.

The final image shows the Parliament House Courtyard. The image shows the simple white walls, with unkempt ivy on the right. The foreground shows a series of white concentric circles on the pavement. Besides complementing the ball light on the column above, the circles are mysterious but their mystery cannot match the moodiness of the Capitol as shown by Hoppe on the final page of his Romantic America.

E.O. Hoppe's photographs of Canberra from The Fifth Continent

In 1945 the wartime souvenir book Displaying Australia compiled file photographs of the nation into sections on states, cities, aborigines, wildlife and main industries. The section on Canberra displays the very conservative architecture of the governmental buildings.(below)

The classical vertical lines of the few completed buildings, such as the Institute of Anatomy, were a fitting vehicle for the book's designers. They were those champions of the bronzed athletic Australian, Charles Meere and Freda Robertshaw.

After the war, Max Dupain took a series of images of the capital. Canberra, Nation's Capital appeared in 1949. During the Second World War several government departments relevant to the War Effort were rapidly moved to Canberra. In the post-war austerity Canberra had been growing slowly, most of its growth being adaptation to its role as a peaceful society, with the start of the Embassy district. The start, with the United States' embassy, of a regional architectural style for the diplomatic buildings was the first move away from Canberra's official Classical Modern style of official architecture. It would not be long before the Hollywood-like Spanish Mission Civic Centre was joined by plain suburban style shopping blocks. Parliament was still sitting in the temporary 1927 building, shown by Dupain behind a foreground of grazing sheep. The text boasts of Canberra's nearness to the Griffins' plans. In 1949 however, the city was still two regions separated by the Molonglo floodplain. The domestic architecture was no longer as carefully regulated, the temporary workers' houses in the Causeway district survived from the Twenties and the suburbs of Lyneham and O'connor were developed with cheap fibro and weatherboard houses. The new houses appear in the book, but only from such a distance that their appearance is obscured. Buses appear in several photographs of the city, to reassure potential residents it would seem. To link the capital with the rest of Australian culture, a photograph of Kingsford Smith's aeroplane Southern Cross appears above Parliament House. The plane had been restored for the recent film Smithy. Film was a major form of entertainment, several images of Canberra's cinemas appear, as does a local radio station.

In 1961 Oswald Ziegler produced Canberra A.C.T. using David Moore as principal photographer. Only five and a half years before, Canberra had been the subject of a planning enquiry. This resulted in the formation of the National Capital Development Commission in 1957, which would oversee the development of the Capital. This was to be done without involvement in local governmental matters, a provision based on the unpopularity of a similar commission's powers during Canberra's settlement.

In the period between the initial settlement and the establishment of the National Capital Development Commission, Canberra's growth was based on the demands of a slowly growing community. Although many Public Service Departments arrived from Melbourne in the late Twenties, it was not until the Second World War that the inconvenience of two centres of Public Service became stifling. The arrival of Departments involved in the war effort had to be undertaken as rapidly and economically as possible.

This, above everything, was the reason for Canberra's loss of planning direction initiated by the Griffins. Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness summed up the loss of foresight.

... new suburbs grew almost as undisciplined as in any other Australian city. Canberra reached its nadir about 1954. A rule which required roads to be made before houses was all that remained of the early idealism. The centre was still dry and empty, Parliament House was still the "provisional" 1927 building next door to the permanent site, and as ill assorted a group of offices, banks and commercial buildings as ever were built- blue tiles, bacon-striped stone, yellow porcelain, concrete grilles, aluminium- began to disgrace the once sleepy Civic Centre. There were no effective building regulations. The airport reception building was a wooden shed.²

While the commercial architecture followed fashion, the Administration Building underway during the Fifties continued the tradition of stern, classically inspired buildings. The Treasury, built on the opposite side of the Parliamentary Triangle a few years later, attempted to bring Classicism to the curtain-wall style but looked like the product of a developing nation's Dictatorship.

The National Capital Development Commission's main population task was the imminent transfer of the last external Defence Offices to the Russell Hill area, which would surround the Australian American War Memorial to make the difficult north-east apex of the Griffin Triangle an active part of Canberra's landscape. The personnel transferred to the capital as a result were anticipated to number sixteen hundred, with the National Capital Development Commission given the task of housing them, beginning in January 1959.³

Because Canberra was growing beyond the bureaucratic service capital and expanding into light industry and tourism, it saw also itself as a potential destination of the migrant intake. Despite a slowdown in the Immigration Scheme, Canberra was expecting a population of 100,000 by 1974.⁴ The purpose of Canberra A.C.T. was to attract settlers to Canberra. As the city's growth began to speed up it was necessary to assure potential residents that the days of pioneering and boredom, that the initial population had found there, were over.

Unlike most publications of this sort, Canberra A.C.T. did not feature a Canberran landmark or monument as its cover image. Instead it bears a photograph, which seems to date from the late Forties, of a 48-215 Holden (the first model, built between 1948 and 1953) and an austerely dressed woman standing near Commonwealth Avenue opposite the Hotel Canberra. The heavily efflorescent image is constructed in a way that makes the Holden and its assumed owner seem to be in their own garden, yet there are certainly no private dwellings within the Parliamentary Triangle. With the book's emphasis on the Capital's modernity it is an unusual choice for the cover.

One reason for its use could be the reassurance of an established city, using one of the grander of the original buildings as a backdrop rather than any of the recent houses. In the December 1959 issue of Architecture in Australia the modem houses of Canberra are shown to lack the established gardens so necessary in the promotion of a Garden City. The journal used some photographs by David Moore, presumably taken at the same time as the series that appears in Canberra A.C.T. Apart from the Holden (which was an American design anyway) there is only a sparse (lerp eaten?) eucalypt to suggest that the subject of Canberra A.C.T. is in Australia.

The design of the initials A.C.T., in large, black, intertwining letters across the photograph and a dull brown background, suggests a new found pride in the Territory. Although designated the Australian Capital Territory in 1938, it was the National Capital Development Commission's influence that started a Territorial pride. The Territory was being defined as a separate entity to the surrounding Monaro region of New South Wales.

There is a sketch on the endpapers of the plans for central Canberra. This is called 'Canberra Vision'. This is a prototype for later books on Canberra which used photographs of the same area. In 1961 the central area was not developed enough to be displayed by photograph. The sketch had the advantage of displaying this part of Canberra as a complete entity, which would be difficult even in a modem image taken over thirty years later. The artist of the sketch would have seen Lawrence Daws's paintings of the future central triangle, commissioned by the National Capital Development Commission as part of the Lake development. Elsewhere in Canberra A.C.T., photographs of the central area draw attention away from the lack of the lake.

At the time of Canberra A.C.T.'s publication, Canberra was subject to criticism over the National Capital Development Commission's decision to finish the lake project. Complaints about the 'Bush Capital' resurfaced. Although the Depression was long over, at the time of the lake's construction the post-war boom was starting to falter. Prime Minister Menzies took advantage of Canberra A.C.T. to defend the lake project in his introduction.

The photographic content of Canberra A.C.T. begins with images of monumental architecture. The next images are of educational and religious institutions. Parliament House, the city's raison d'etre, does not appear until the ninth page of photographs. The scenery of the Australian Capital Territory follows, thence recreation and commerce.[figures 88,89J As well as the endpapers, plans for the future appear on the final page.

The opportunity is taken to display the Garden City's parklands. The colour photographs represent all seasons, with a bias towards autumnal images. Unlike Canberra, National Capital of 1949, the spaces around important buildings are not shown to be grazing land. Canberra was now a sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing capital, not a 'good sheep station spoiled.⁵ Despite the lack of trees in the newer areas, shown in the December 1959 issue of Architecture in Australia, Canberra's early tree planting excesses and resistance to telegraph poles managed to avoid the syndrome identified by Robin Boyd as arboreaphobia.⁶

The Canberrans of 1960-1961 are shown working, playing and shopping. The images of shopping are taken around the Civic Centre. As for the other, older, shopping centres, Manuka and Kingston, they appear in an aerial image of Telopea Park. The shops of the Civic Centre include a Waltons-Sears as well as innumerable small businesses. The make up of the centre, with one visible department store surrounded by small specialists is of a more suburban than city shopping centre. The citizens of the public service city are promised the suburban dream.

In 1966, following the success of Life at The Cross, Ziegler, Rigby and Slessor reteamed to produce Canberra. Canberra was a less successful book than its predecessor. This was partly because of the lack of a clear principal photographer but also because Slessor was writing away from his oeuvre of King's Cross. Canberra's new found image as a cosmopolitan city was given so much attention in the text and captions that the whole exercise oozes pretension. Canberra's main theatre did have a larger proscenium than Covent Garden, but to suggest getting out of an FB Holden taxi equals the glamour of a West End opening night?(below) This could be called a delusion of grandeur, and why another old Holden?

Pretension aside, the city was genuinely beginning to lose its suburban-ness. The buildings in the Civic Centre were getting taller and there was the Monaro Mall complex adding to the shopping precinct. The completion of Lake Burley Griffin allowed for the unity of the city to be portrayed in aerial photography. The city was finally growing according to plan.

1. 1. E. O. Hoppe, The Fifth Continent, Simpkin Marshall, London, 1931.
2. Robin Boyd, Tlie Australian Ugliness, 1960, p 14. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the planning rule which survived from the early days of settlement regarding the finishing of roads was not actually observed, sec Lionel Wigmorc, The Long View, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963, Pp 152-153.
3. Rodger Rea, Text for Canberra A.C.T., Sydney, 1961.
4. 1959 estimates, National Capital Development Commission Planning Report, Canberra, February 1961, p 6.
5. Lionel Wigmore, op cit, 1963, p 174.
6. Arboiaphobia is a fear that leads suburban Australians to unnecessarily destroy their gardens' trees. Robin Boyd, op cit 4.4 6, 1960, Pp 75-78.

8.2 Brisbane, the capital of Queensland and the Gold Coast, the capital of Austerica

Brisbane was the only other Australian capital city to get much attention in the field of phototexts. Hobart and Perth figured in Hurley's books on their home state, Adelaide was only featured in books about Australia in general. Of course these cities all had little publications devoted to them but their contribution to the phototexts debate was minimal.

Hoppe's images of Brisbane in The Fifth Continent, 1931, are the first major images of the city to appear in a phototext. Theview from Mount Cootha [sic] is well composed, if familiar. The photograph of a city street is interesting. The centre of the image is occupied by a horse and sulky, behind which is a truck, with a man (its driver, presumably) sitting on a fender. The image is framed by a Moreton Bay fig tree and its shadow, in the background two city streetscapes converge to the left.

Art in Australia Limited's The Brisbane Book, 1932,was much simpler in style than the Sydney and Melbourne Books of 1931. Most of its content was supplied by the Government and was subsequently full of photographs of public buildings in clear definition rather than the more artistic product of the pictorialists used in Sydney and Melbourne.

Brisbane from Mount Cootha, E.O. Hoppe	Brisbane, E.O. Hoppe
below - images from The Brisbane Book, Art In Australia 1932

Ziegler's 1949 production, Brisbane, Queensland's Capital, shows the city immediately after the Second World War, where so many of the visiting American forces had stayed. The book shows Brisbane as a busy commercial centre with typical emphasis on health, religion and recreation. Also featured is Brisbane's role as a link in the air travel industry, which would grow to be part of the tourism industry.

Ziegler's next Brisbane book, Brisbane, City in the Sun, from 1957, shows the same city as Brisbane, Queensland's Capital after a decade of growth. The same emphasis on society and air travel is shown here. By this time, as the title suggests, more is made of the city's tropical reputation. By then Brisbane had already began its symbiotic relationship with the nearby resort towns of the Gold Coast.

Brisbane is also featured in Frank Hurley's Queensland, a Camera Study from 1950. Hurley's interest in the dramatic covers not only the civic architecture and landscape but also includes the agriculture, as evedenced by a photograph of a pineapple crop. Hurley's book also included the resort of Coolangatta, which was then on the verge of becoming part of an important tourist growth area, the Gold Coast.

Frank Hurley's Queensland - Town Hall	Pineapples

At the end of the 1950s two architectural critics, Robin Boyd and Peter Newell had some quite similar points to make about the development of the Gold Coast.

 (The wind) blows a low cloud of sand over the beach, driving the local inhabitants into the township for their coffee and real estate deals. There, in glass-fronted offices, the accepted dress is the lightest cotton shorts and shirt. Waitresses at an espresso bar wear some sort of reduced sarong. A stockbroker stands on the footpath outside his office-shop on the yellow Pacific Highway dressed in black bathing trunks, brief case, and a flapping floral shirt. Everywhere in the streets, shops and cafes, chocolate-brown limbs bulge out of short sleeves and shorter trouser-legs.

There is a feeling of adventure and excitement, rare enough in Australia. You might call Surfers a sort of cream, or thick skin, skimmed off the top of Australia's mid-century boom. It is rowdy, good-natured, flamboyant, crime-free, healthy, and frankly and happily Austerican. It sets out to be a little Las Vegas. It is proud of being a poor man's Miami.¹

Colourful shopping arcades, motels, own-your-own-flats, sophisticated coffee houses and cabarets are appearing around the new hotels competing with each other in designs of almost valid vulgarity and "glamourous" names emblazoned in neon lights.

The glamour of the Gold Coast is now having widespread infectious influence. When the afternoon winds banish visitors from the surf beaches, a popular pastime requires driving the family's two-tone flight-form power-packed vehicle to admire and colour-photograph the latest "architectural" creations.²

Queensland's Gold Coast, like Canberra, was a rural by-way until the developers moved in during the mid 1920s. Unlike Canberra's bureaucratically controlled growth, the Gold Coast grew as the economy dictated. Surfers' Paradise started to grow in 1926 between the established townships of Southport and Coolangatta but it was the 1950s boom that saw it emerge as the new tourist centre.

Until then, it was the older resort town of Coolangatta which appeared in such volumes as Frank Hurley's Queensland a Camera Study in 1950. Photographs centred on the beach life, the townscape served as a backdrop. Coolangatta was a border town, linked by road and rail to Brisbane and little else. During the 1950s the domestic air travel market expanded to the point where Brisbane's little hideaways became national tourist destinations.

With the new tourist potential, the little townships of Southport, Coolangatta and Surfers' Paradise threw on bright coats of paint and welcomed new hotels and residences. At a time when Canberra was carefully dictating the aesthetic quality of each new house, The Gold Coast, as it came to be known, let itself be covered with endless variations of spec, built fibrolite weekenders.

It is little surprise that, in 1959, the journal Architecture in Australia devoted two issues to the development of each city. This equality of attention pre-empted Robin Boyd's observation of 1960, that Surfers' was "the capital of Austerica."³   Austerica, according to Boyd, was that section of Australia which envied and emulated the American Dream, a taste Boyd contrasted to the conservative Anglophiles.

Until 1958 the Gold Coast had been included in books about Brisbane or Queensland. The most important of these was Frank Hurley's Brisbane and the Gold Coast in Natural Colour, circa 1956. Unlike the architectural critics, Hurley was there to show the commercial, flattering side of the region. He wasn't there to poke his nose into corners where it wasn't welcome. He shows a Gold Coast that is bright and cheery. The chaotic modernity of Surfers' Paradise sits comfortably between the rural townscape of Southport and the old fashioned holiday camp atmosphere of Coolangatta. It is amazing what a few coats of colourful paint could do to unite the disunity of form. Especially when reproduced in the blocky, exaggerated colours that the printing industry of the time was capable of using.

Hurley's most definitive insight into the capital of Austerica is a photograph of "The Walk". "The Walk" was an arcade in Surfers' Paradise which obviously revelled in its own modernity. Closer in form to an American Shopping Mall than the Victorian arcades of Australia's major cities, "The Walk" was part of the commercial aesthetic which was appearing in new shopping centres.

The buildings were highly contemporary with louvres, decorative screens, fluorescent lights and cantilevered balconies, painted white and detailed in navy blue above and deep red at street level. An ambitious mural on a tower to the left documents the progress of human culture, offset by a tropical plant. The three visible shops are, from left to right, a swimwear boutique, a detached barbecue restaurant called "La Ronde" and a broker's office. Leisure and affluence, the Austerican dream. The native pedestrians are dressed informally in pastels. Outside the broker's office waits a large green limousine.

The image is pure show. Only a tell-tale weatherboard shop poorly hidden by a modern extension allows the story of the area's humble past to intrude upon the image.⁴

In 1958, not long before the region was incorporated as a city, Oswald Ziegler produced one of his promotional books, bound lavishly in golden cover. The first half of Gold Coast is like most Ziegler books of the late 1950s, which tended to give greater emphasis to a textual history of the region rather than using contemporary illustration. Because the tourist appeal of the Gold Coast was a recent event, Gold Coast offers a rather uncharacteristically dull history to the region, full of details of early settlers and primary industries which had little or nothing to do with the region's latter day success. Unlike other regions, there was not even a mercantile link which could be forged between the old and new.

This suddenly changes at the start of Chapter Five, entitled 'Australia's Glamour Coast, Surfers Paradise to Currumbin.' Conservative Southport and Coolangatta are relegated to peripheral status, the former is promoted for its business opportunities, the latter as another little resort.

Bikini-clad bathing beauties appear in this section, gone are Hurley's family groups, to be replaced by cheesecake.[figure 95] The family resort was about to be replaced by singles bars. Bright lights are shown, neon signs for motels and cabarets. The same reclaimed swamp housing estates that Architecture in Australia decried as irresponsible are touted as 'gaily coloured butterflies (emerging) from drab looking chrysalises'.⁵   A similar contrast can be made of the housing style. Even 'The Walk' appears, although this time it is in the foreground of an image of the palm-lined Pacific Highway.

Most images are of restful, contented tourism. One awkward image stands out from this. Taken at the Currumbin bird sanctuary, it shows the birds arriving at feeding time. ] Not only are the tourists obviously nervous about the flock of lorikeets that has descended upon them; one woman is laughing while hiding behind her hand; but the man in charge is obviously most uncomfortable with about ten hungry lorikeets on him. Amidst the posed glamour of the other images, this photograph, however awkward and poorly exposed, is charmingly honest.

Not every part of the Gold Coast was youthful and near-naked. Southport's contribution to the recreational images is a photograph of the bowling green. Behind the youthful zest of the Gold Coast's public image, there has always been a swarm of conservative developers promoting the growth of the region. The presence of such a normal suburban image pre-empts the eventual domination of suburban development behind the facade of the coastal resort. The Gold Coast's reliance on a particular image continues to contrast to an ever decaying reputation. Its youthful getaway appeal, like Sydney's Kings Cross's Bohemian image, disguised a good deal of decadence, presenting it as neon signs and cabarets.

1. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, F.W. Cheshire, 1960.
2. Peter Newell, 'Umbigumbi to the Gold Coast', Architecture in Australia, Volume 48, Number 1, January-March 1959.
3. Boyd, op cit 1.
4. When Architecture in Australia included an image of "The Walk" in their Gold Coast issue they were not as flattering. A neon sign and seat at the entrance break the pattern. Ordinary cars like a Holden and a Morris park carelessly where the limousine once waited. The shape of "La Ronde" is dominated by an unsympathetic background.
5. Eve Keane, Oswald L. Ziegler, Gold Coast, Oswald Ziegler, 1958.

8.3 Newcastle, and provincial New South Wales

In the late fifties Oswald Ziegler's phototexts on provincial centres in New South Wales changed from small booklets to larger, well-bound books. The earlier books often included very rural districts, like Coolah in 1949 and Gloucester in 1952, or tourist centres like the Blue Mountains in 1939 and neighbouring Penrith in 1948. Starting with Newcastle in 1947, Ziegler developed a series of books on the larger provincial centres of New South Wales.

Newcastle was Australia's largest provincial city. It was also the city with the strongest connection to industrial growth. When it celebrated the sesqui-centenary of Lieutenant Shortland's arrival at the Hunter River in 1947, it took advantage of an Oswald Ziegler book to show its industrial might. The principal photographer for Newcastle 150 Years was Max Dupain.

Newcastle's foremost reputation was always that of the industrial city. Its earlier appearances in photographic books was consequently as an industrial city first, then, depending on available space, a more detailed visual analysis was made. Dupain showed much more than the industrial side of the city.

There are pictures of city facilities, public housing and parks. Interesting features, such as the weatherbeaten coastline and an eroded sandstone wall, appear. There is also an example of a typical Dupain night-time exposure, looking over the Harbour from Church Walk, near the City Hall. One of Dupain's photographs, of logs waiting to be loaded on to a ship, was such a strikingly composed picture it was used by Laurence Le Guay in his 1950 Portfolio of Australian Photography and was later featured in Max Dupain's Australia.

A tendency, mainly of Frank Hurley but also in Max Dupain's work, was to portray Newcastle's industrial workings through a vignette effect. This is an interesting contrast to the American style of industrial photography, which was decidedly phallic.¹

Perhaps Margaret Preston was right when she observed that "Newcastle must be feminine; it has changed its name three or more times."² The first such Hurley photograph appeared amongst Dupain's work in Newcastle 150 Years in 1947. This image, of a propeller being fitted in the State Dockyard, appeared with similar images in Sydney, A Camera Study the following year. The Newcastle section of Sydney, A Camera Study was largely industrial but a fine aerial shot shows the wedge-like business district, perched on a peninsula, with department stores, trams office blocks and other trappings of city life of the forties.

In the days when the Cold War was just beginning, and its effect on the reputation of the more Socialist aspirations of Australian politics was minimal, Newcastle City Council was quite boastful of the diversity of its operations, which included two theatres, one near the older Town Hall in the business district and the other as part of the developing Civic Centre. In 1947, as well as the theatre, the Civic Centre, underway since the twenties, consisted of a large City Hall, a small park and NESCA House, home of the council's electricity company, designed by leading Art Deco architect Emil Sodersteen with a local firm.

A decade later Ziegler returned to Newcastle, producing Symphony on a City. As its title suggests, Newcastle was projecting a more cultured image. In 1958 Newcastle was celebrating the completion of its War Memorial Cultural Centre, featuring the city's library and art gallery. Symphony on a City showed the cultural life of Newcastle with more detail than the industrial areas which had previously dominated the city's image.³

In 1963 Ziegler published books on both Maitland and Wollongong. These were his last rural phototexts. These cities shared a commercial similarity to Newcastle. In the mid 19th Century, Maitland had been the major city of the Hunter Valley region and had been the original home of the region's manufacturing industries. WoUongong emerged as a city in the 20th Century out of a string of South Coast mining towns, dairying communities and tourist resorts. This development was backed by B.H.P.'s investment in the Port Kembla steelworks.

Maitland featured in both of Ziegler's Newcastle books, albeit as a briefly mentioned satellite. In 1963 the Rutherford estate on the western edge of the city had become a major growth centre in itself. A new Belmore Bridge was nearing completion after the old bridge sustained damage during the 1955 flood. The city council celebrated its centenary with a view to expanding the business district. Like Canberra before it, in Canberra A.C.T., Oswald Ziegler's Maitland 1863-1963 featured an artist's impression of the future city, surrounded by ring roads and parking lots, as it is indeed today.

Sublime Vision, Ziegler's Wollongong book, took its title from Sublime Point, the dominant image of Wollongong, featured in many books on New South Wales or Australia. Views from the Illawarra Escarpment feature throughout the book but they do not dominate. Like Newcastle, Wollongong was controlled by the one Greater City council, making promotion of civic services, in this case libraries and baby health centres, an important part of the book.

Because of Wollongong background as a series of small towns, these towns-come-suburban-centres are examined one by one, north through south. The prospect of employment, television and sport is enhanced. Youthfulness is celebrated in an image of youths sunbaking and riding horses in sand dunes, but the expressions on the nearby sunbathers reveal a distrust of the photographer-intruder.

The business district of Wollongong was only then beginning to feel the effect of the city's growth. Its first office blocks were being developed, the first department stores opening. The historic strength of Wollongong's suburban centres, particularly Corrimal and Port Kembla, undermined the importance of the business district. Since decentralisation was becoming a force in urban planning, this was not a big problem until more recent times.

Images from Ziegler's Maitland
Images from Ziegler's Wollongong

1. sec Terry Smith, Making the Modern, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
2. Margaret Preston, "From Margaret Preston's Travel Note Book", Tlie Australia Week-End Book 1, Ure Smith, 1942.
3. The Cultural Centre owed its existence to a Doctor Roland Pope who left his art collection to the city because it was the largest Australian city not to have such a facility. Interestingly, this was a time when several ex-Novocastrians were making their presence felt in the emerging Abstract Expressionist school in Australia, including John Olsen, William Rose and Jon Molvig. Fifteen years after his portrait of Joshua Smith, Cook's Hill native William Dobell, who had returned to the Newcastle region, had maintained his notoriety.
4. In 1858 the colonial laws regarding local government were amended. This heralded the foundation of many new councils and layed the foundation for many centennial publications.

8.4 Ziegler's post war provincial publications

Published in 1946, Goulburn, Queen City of the South was the first of Ziegler's post-war provincial promotional books to appear. Based on the photographs of Reg Perrier, the book so impressed Goulburn's community that the local paper re­issued it two years after its first appearance.

Taking advantage of Goulburn's position between Sydney and Canberra, Goulburn, Queen City of the South promotes the pastoral community as a future industrial centre. The residential possibilities of the city are featured, encouraging new residents. It became a practice of such provincial promotions to depict the most modern and, if practicable, affluent of the region's housing in order to impress the comfortable lifestyle upon the intending settler.

Penrith was published in 1948, while the town was still a rural retreat. Penrith's proximity to the Lower Blue Mountains was its main drawcard, as well as small resorts along the Nepean River. The industrial estate at St. Mary's where the United States Army had set up an armaments site during the Second World War receives a little promotion, but the idea of the booklet is nonetheless for the tourist. Valley of the Winds was published for the Coolah district in 1949.

Albury, also from 1949, has in interesting colour scheme, divided into colours representing the four seasons. This is to promote Albury as a year-round resort or a site for business investment. Forbes and the Vale of Gloucester followed in 1951 and 1952 respectively. The former is notable for the layout, the latter for its Dupain photographs.

Ziegler's provincial publications began to diversify in the middle of the fifties. Books like Coonamble Centenary, 1855-1955 moved away from pictorial coverage towards a textual history while Parramatta Pageant, also of 1955, continued the pattern set in the forties, albeit with a larger format and hard covers.

Some of New South Wales' other major regional centres were also given coverage by Oswald Ziegler about this time. Goulburn celebrated its centenary in 1959 with Goulburn, Gateway to the South. The title, more than reminiscent of the Peter Sellers sketch Balham, Gateway to the South, suggested the city's advantageous position on the Hume Highway, between Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.

Orange 1860-1960 was another anniversary volume. Both books dealt with the cities' modernity, job prospects and tourist potential. Goulburn had its history, Orange had snowfields. These volumes marked the end of the provincial phototext. From this point, the phototexts became an oeuvre of the main cities.

Images from Ziegler's Coolah (NSW)

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NEXT >>>  Last Chapter - Conclusion

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

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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.

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