Book – Imagining a Real Australia: The Documentary Style 1950-1980

Author: Stephen ZagalaPublisher: NewsouthReviewer: Franklin Richards*

Imagining a Real Australia deserves to be a much bigger book than it is. Its A4 size a reflection of the cost of production rather than the worth of its contents.

It is more than a book of pictures. Rather, it is a collection of images that tell stories, provoke thought and stir emotion. Mostly black and white, they are beautiful, some so engaging they make it difficult to turn the page.

The author, Stephen Zagala, was principal curator at the Museum of Australian Photography between 2006 and 2017 and a research fellow at the South Australian Museum between 2017 and 2024. He has curated more than 60 exhibitions.

Zagala has arranged his work into five parts: Real Style, Real Space, Real People, Real Movement and Real Futures. His writing is sparce, but informative, and complements the true stars of the work, which, of course, are the photographs.

The book includes works of iconic photographers such as Max Dupain and those of lesser-known artists such as Wolfgang Stevens, Ricky Maynard and Ruth Maddison.

Max Dupain is represented not by his popular image Sunbaker, but by Meat queue and Sandwich girl. Meat queue portrays dour, war-weary women, queueing to use their ration tickets. Zagala writes:

In many respects, Meat queue is an atypical image of Dupain, with its overt sociological subject matter and airless composition. Nevertheless, the use of candid gestures in a relatable social setting serves to demonstrate Dupain’s mastery of the documentary style, and this image is often cited as one of his best photographs.

Dupain is also represented by his light infused, industrial image of concrete beams supporting the Sydney Opera House and his quirky image of the Sandwich girl. Of this last image, Zagala writes:

Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and, by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they create and live.

The images span the nation and decades from the 1950s to the 1980s. They capture people, places and activities that are gone, but resonate still with beauty and warmth. There is Jeff Carter’s Hop pickers of Rostrevor hop garden in Victoria’s picturesque Ovens Valley. A rugged man and woman, we imagine, husband and wife, standing in a corridor of towering hop vines. Zagala tells us that:

Jeff Carter (1928-2010) forged a down-to-earth career as a roaming photojournalist when he set off hitchhiking around Australia in 1946. With a typewriter and camera in his backpack, Carter collected stories about the people he met, and turned his adventures into episodic yarns.

A more modern rendition of this approach is the colour ‘shot through the windscreen’ style, of Wesley Stacey’s The Road series. Snapshots of roadside fast-food shops, cinemas and bus stops from around the country. Stacey is also represented by the futuristic looking image, Surfboards, Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross. A picture in which upturned surfboards on a car roof rack appear transformed into spaceships.

There are intimate domestic images by Ruth Maddison, unflinching self-portraits by Sue Ford and the iconic feminist image, Vale Street, by Carol Jerrems. Add to all this the raw images of and by first nations people, and Imagining a Real Australia, does just as the name suggests.

This is a book to be savoured. Within it are images to make you think and feel, as well as others that you will simply love.

*Franklin Richards is a Legal Aid Queensland Assistant Public Defender based in Townsville. He was admitted to the Bar in 1997, has worked in private practice with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service and the with Qld ODPP.