Purposeful Nation-Building: Photography, Modernisation and Post-War Reconstruction in Australia

Abstract

This article considers how Australian photography from the late 1930s to the early 1950s encouraged public engagement with the aims and policies of post-war reconstruction. It examines how the nation’s first photo-magazine, Pix, covered the build up to and early months of the war and emphasised its reach into the domestic sphere. It examines photography’s role in making housing a core social and political issue, considers Australia’s efforts to house its returning service personnel, and the innovative responses of the public and private sectors to shortages of materials and manpower. It analyses how photography established the modern home as the emblem of a new beginning and how it shifted the consumer’s perspective from exterior views of the house to a focus on interiors and the imagined experience of habitation. Appraising Wolfgang Sievers’ popularisation of modern home design, the article will conclude by examining photography’s role in capturing the epic scale of post-war reconstruction’s greatest engineering triumph – the Snowy Mountain Hydro Electric Scheme.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Australia
• Modernism
• Post-War Reconstruction
• Pix, Wolfgang Sievers
• the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this article for their close reading and many helpful suggestions as to how it could be improved. My thanks also to Claire Gorrara and Tom Allbeson whose sensitive and precise edit materially improved the final outcome. I extend my sincere appreciation to Erika Esau for her prompt and friendly assistance with sourcing Figure 8; Harry Mee at the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences for assistance with sourcing a copy of image 6; staff at the National Archives of Australia for their prompt response to my request for a copy of Figure 7; the helpful staff at the State Library of New South Wales for their assistance in locating a copy of Figure 4; Anne Holloway and the staff in the Rare Books and Special Collections area of the Matheson Library at Monash University for their prompt attention to my request for copies of Figures 1–3 inclusive.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more on the development of Australian infrastructure and manufacturing see, respectively, Ergas and Pincus, 2014: 222–244, and Hutchinson, 2014: 287–308.

2 The Australian War Memorial records the names of all photographers whose images reside in its collections. See https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/official_photo/list

3 For more on the founding of the MHS see Foster, 2016: 259–263, and Lakin, 2008: 105–113. See also Treloar, 1942.

4 Treloar was highly prescriptive in his descriptions of what photographers should feature and the style required for such images. When not covering active operations, Treloar directed the photographers to “prepare records of units. The photographs required include portraits of COs., and of personnel who have been decorated, groups of the officers, NCOs and of the units themselves.” They were encouraged to include images of the troops’ “sleeping quarters, messing, bathing, recreational and training activities, church parade”, as well as “the system of supply, evacuation of sick and wounded, delivery of letters and parcels, signals, ordnance, supply of ammunition, supply of petrol, handling of prisoners of war, recovery and repair of guns and motor vehicles, etc.” (Treloar, Notes for information, paras 103, 106, 109.)

5 For an authoritative account of the establishment and operations of the DoI see Hilvert, 1984.

6 The sales figures for the Sun reflect the average Monday-Friday circulation for the six months to September 1939 and were reported in Newspaper News. 12:7, 4. The sales figures for Pix are from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, now administered by the Audited Media Association of Australia.

7 In some cases, these images were sourced directly from the magazine’s readers via a boxed invitation featured on the back page of every edition. In soliciting ‘unusual pictures which have not appeared elsewhere,’ for which Pix promised to ‘pay top rate’, the magazine enhanced its readers’ ownership of and agency in crafting a vision of the nation they constituted (Pix, 27 May 1939, 56).

8 For more on this see Stanley, 2008.

9 Macintyre explores the history and preceding usages of the term ‘reconstruction’, see Macintyre, 2015: 47–8.

10 In France, the Ministre de la Reconstruction et de l’Urbanisme, established at the end of the war ran until 1958.

11 Isobel Crombie notes the profound influence of German thought on the development of this movement.

12 For more on Dupain’s modernist photographs see Newton, 1980. It should be noted that not all photographers saw modern development as the enemy of individual and collective health. Laurence Le Guay’s photomontages, particularly ‘The Progenitors’ (1938) sought to establish clear links between industrial development and the breeding of a new and vital physicality. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/169.1979/#about (Accessed 20 January 2022.)

13 An inspection of 6390 dwellings within an eight-kilometre radius of the city revealed that the majority had no kitchen, a third no bathroom and a quarter neither gas nor electricity. Half were judged unfit for human habitation without repair. For more on this see Macintyre, 2015: 175–6, 178–9.

14 The other photos illustrated the decrepitude of the Ryan family home and the dilapidation of the housing stock in the surrounding areas.

15 Whatever the weight of good intentions, efforts to replace substandard dwellings, to build homes fit for heroes in the numbers needed were consistently thwarted. Construction had come to a virtual halt during the Depression and there was insufficient rental accommodation for those on low incomes. NSW and SA established authorities with power to remove slums and build affordable housing. But the Pacific War intervened and again brought construction to a standstill as the Commonwealth used a variety of war controls on land sales, mortgage borrowing, building permits and materials to prevent house building. In its interim report, the Commission estimated the by the beginning of 1945 there would be a backlog of around 300,000 dwellings. As the private sector could not meet this need, (it had built no more than 40,000 homes per year before the war), only government had the capacity to provide Australians with housing at an affordable price. It advocated for the establishment of a Commonwealth Housing Authority (CHA) to realise this goal.

16 The housing shortage was felt most acutely in the nation’s two most populous states. The New South Wales and Victorian governments had completed only 3151 and 2593 houses respectively by early 1947, and 9811 and 7814 by June 1949. In Victoria, the State Government built extensive public housing estates to address the needs of specific industries or employers – most notably in Geelong to serve the Shell Refinery, the Ford Plant and the International Harvester works, and in the La Trobe Valley to serve the State Electricity Commission’s brown coal mines and power stations. Other state industries took the lead in housing their own workers. ‘Operation Snail’ was a program initiated by the Victorian Railways in 1949, ‘under which migrants were recruited in England to come to Victoria and work for the railways’ (O’Hanlon, 2009: 113.) To ensure that they could be offered housing, without exacerbating the already critical shortage of homes, the railways approached some of Melbourne’s most prominent architectural practices to design an array of low-cost, modular houses. They then contracted Simms, Cooke and Sons of Nottingham to mass-produce pre-fabricated houses that the workers would bring with them, flat-packed aboard ship, for assembly and erection when they arrived in Victoria. Like snails, the migrant workers carried their houses with them. Ray Edgar notes that ‘The mass-produced components were packaged in kits with DIY instructions that could be erected by unskilled labour. Forty-four types of two-, three- and four-bedroom houses could be assembled from the same basic kits” (Edgar, 21 August 2020).

17 A number of these houses have survived and can still be found in the Melbourne suburb of Pascoe Vale South.

18 The NSW chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects didn’t get its branch of the SHS off the ground until 1953.

19 For more on Robin Boyd see Niall, 2002: 249–292.

20 For more on the Small Homes Service see Stead, 2018.

21 As a consequence, when the government finally went to the people in August 1944 to seek the constitutional change it needed to carry forward its reconstruction project, it was soundly rebuffed. 46.5% supported the ‘yes’ vote, with 53.5% voting ‘no’. At State level, the yes vote achieved a majority only in South Australia and Western Australia. For further details on the outcome of the voting see Macintyre, 2015: 269-70.

22 As the war was drawing to a close, the government encouraged the expansion of manufacturing to absorb demobilised labour. It believed that by ‘reducing the country’s reliance on agricultural products that were susceptible to seasonal conditions and international circumstances, local production would bring greater economic stability’ (Macintyre, 2015: 340–41.) As a consequence, by 1949 manufacturing accounted for twenty-eight per cent of total employment.

23 See Sievers, ca. 1950-1951.

24 See Sievers, 1949b, and Sanders, 1941.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Foster

Kevin Foster is Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne. He has published widely on representations of conflict, including a number of articles on Australian combat photography in the Second World War. His most recent book, Anti-Social Media: Conventional Militaries in the Digital Battlespace was published in 2021 by Melbourne University Press.

Correspondence to: Kevin Foster, Monash University, Clayton, Australia. Email: [email protected]