Between 1939 and 1996 the government hired dozens of photographers to document life around Australia.
Now many of their diverse works of intimate nature photography, striking architectural shots and captured everyday memories from Australia’s past will be displayed in a new exhibition at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.
Curator of the Focus: Australian government photographers exhibition Emily Catt said the job of government photographers 80 years ago was to “create a photographic library of Australia”.
“If you think about now, if you want to know something about a country, you go online and you google search it and you’re going to get great results quite easily,” she said.
“In 1940 if you want to know about a country, how do you get information? And that’s where the Department of Information and their successes really came in.”
Established during World War II, the Department of Information changed names and purposes slightly throughout the decades before being merged with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and largely wrapping up in the 90s, with the invention of the internet.
But its employed photographers left behind an archive of images showing a slice of everyday life in Australia.
“People assume [archived images are] just prime minister meet and greets,” Ms Catt said.
“But they’ve created this amazing pictorial library that covers not just farms and industry but people out shopping, public events, all sorts of walks of Australian life.”
The department had offices both in Australia and overseas, released their own publications and put on exhibitions.
But the department also supplied images to other news bureaus and publications, and even to the general public.
“We even had a letter from a student in California who came to the information bureau in the 1950s, asking if someone in Australia would be interested in exchanging a koala for a classroom pet,” Ms Catt said.
“I don’t believe the student got her koala, which is sad for her.”
‘Really tried to push it back to the people’
For Ms Catt, a stand-out photographer in the exhibition was Keith Byron, who she said had a great talent for capturing people’s emotional reactions.
“We have him photographing the audience at a sports event, and there is an audience member who is having an experience that everyone has – he’s got both his hands on his face, and he looks sort of horrified,” he said.
“And God knows what was happening on the field, but everyone knows that experience of being in the audience and being shocked.”
Ms Catt said Byron’s photography worked well for the exhibition’s focus on everyday Australians over big events and well-known people.
“He also has a photograph of two young boys who have climbed a tree to get a better view, and they look so happy and a bit smug being up there,” she said.
“Because we have so many photographs of events that are usually from a diplomatic perspective, or the Queen’s opening an event or something like that, I really tried to push it back to the people.”
‘Anglo-Celtic and very male-dominated’
Ms Catt said a major struggle in putting the exhibition together was the almost exclusively Anglo-Celtic male perspective of the government employed photographers.
But it does include one First Nations photographer, Mervyn Bishop, who was the first Indigenous photographer to work for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
“What makes his photos truly unique and special [is] it was the first time the First Nations eye, from a government perspective, was being turned on the people,” Ms Catt said.
“He manages to create these very very sensitive, up close and very personal portraits of these individuals – they’re very, very powerful.
“There’s a photograph of a little girl he took on the bus, and she’s almost staring down at the photographer. It’s a really great, powerful photograph.”
The collection also includes the work of one female photographer, Jocelyn Burt, who was not one of the photographers employed by the government but did freelance work for the department.
“Early on in her career it was supported by her doing nursing as well, and we’ve got great photographs that she took in the Torres Strait,” Ms Catt said.
“She would go up there, do nursing and take these photographs, and then the government departments actually purchased her photos – so they thought they were great enough to acquire and bring into the collection.”
The Focus: Australian government photographers exhibition opens on Friday at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra.
The exhibition will run until June 10, 2024, and has free entry.