From the loft

In 1990 a forgotten police photographic archive was discovered in the flooded basement of a suburban Sydney warehouse. An estimated four tons of negatives in glass plate and cellulose based formats were rescued and dried out by conservators and others. The negatives were transferred to the Museum’s loft for safe-keeping and in 2006 managerial responsibility for the archive was transferred to the Justice and Police Museum.

At the end of 2006 I joined the museum team and took on the mammoth task of organising, scanning, cataloguing and re-housing in conservation standard materials, this huge and largely unexplored collection. When I first climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the loft and stepped onto its coir matting I felt at once intrigued, overwhelmed and slightly intrusive. I paused, noticing the musty smell, before moving into the dimly lit space. My eyes traced the wooden shelving jutting at various heights towards the raking ceiling. The light switch flicked on to little affect. Between the tall, dark shelving I was surrounded by a towering corridor of pigeonholes. Each compartment was precariously stacked with branded boxes of varying size or grubbiness, some appeared to be failing under the weight of those above. Other boxes were damaged or without ends allowing me a glimpse at their negative content. The archive was a fascinating puzzle even before peering into silver emulsions.

The loft space that houses the collection was renovated and refurbished just over a year ago. Smooth metal shelves inside the newly constructed negative cool store now provide a home to a diverse mix of photographic media depicting many strange, provocative and mysterious subjects. My initial surreal experience of the loft is now just a distant memory. Only a few snapshots remain to remind me of the amazing changes implemented to stabilise and preserve this important resource. Over the last two years a team of staff, volunteers and interns have made a huge contribution to progressing this project. I look forward to sharing the knowledge, stories and some marvelous photographs excavated since my first encounter with the loft.

Exposure: Ruth Williams, Media Relations Manager for the Historic Houses Trust, interviews curators of the Archive Gallery, Holly Schulte and Caleb Williams.

Ruth: So guys, what led to the development of this new space, The Archive Gallery at the museum?

Holly: There are so many inspiring images that we find everyday …this is a way of getting them out there, literally ‘exposing them’.

Ruth: Hence the title of the first exhibition you have put on – “exposure”.

Caleb: That’s right, but it is a ‘play on words’ … both in terms of an exposure as a way of making an image on film, and exposing a hidden reality … the daily work assignments police photographers undertook between 1920-60.

Ruth: Its a large collection, this first exhibition consists of 42 images. Was it hard to make the choice?

Holly: We were looking at images that have only recently been discovered … the exhibition is our response to images that excited, or intrigued us. The process of selection was hard … ultimately those images that resonated the most were included. We broke them down into loosely themed groupings that explored different spaces and scenes … domestic, industrial, rural, mug-shot, murder, accident … scenarios that confronted the photographers on a daily basis.

Ruth: Fascinating, it is interesting to understand what goes on in a curator’s mind and why these decisions are made.

Caleb: What came through for us very strongly in this show, was the material shot in the late 1940s into the 1950s … more police, lighter cameras, deeper encompassment of Sydney geography. Photos revealing shadowy streets, sunlit summer evenings, working class neighborhoods, without a car or tree that had not seen a lick of paint for 50 years … there is a real sense of Sydney as a place … its gritty soul bared to the lens, without make up.

Ruth: I understand these images have not been seen in previous books or exhibitions within the museum?

Holly: Yes, it is true the images are completely fresh … not seen before. These images were taken for a short term practical purpose of crime investigation … they were never intended to be seen by the public … that we can see them now is remarkable … and that so many of them are such strong, well considered examples of photography in their own right is even more remarkable. At the moment much work is going to reconstruct the history and stories behind these images.

Ruth: Interestingly enough many photos contain unexpected portraits of investigators on the scene. The show seems to blend the sinister, the poetic, and the practical.

Caleb: In all previous accounts of the collection the words ‘anonymous’ and ‘photographer’ have been linked. We wanted to re-connect the photographers with the scenes they took … so photographers caught in mirrors, reflective surfaces, revealed by their shadows, or hands and feet in the photographic frame seemed important to include. The recording of the crime scene for police purposes involves the capture of a form of dark, hidden history, and those that created it need to be brought back into the light with the photos they took.

Photographed 10 January 1924 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW

During the early 20th century many unmarried or widowed women with children lived in circumstances of abject poverty. Unable to work during a time when there were no welfare payments, they were often driven to commit desperate acts. Whole columns of the Police Gazette were dedicated to tracing the parents of abandoned children. A typical example being:

A woman who can only be described as of medium height and build, and fair complexion, called on Bella Leek, residing at 182 Underwood-street, Paddington, and asked her to hold her male infant, about 2 months old, for a few minutes, but failed to return. The child has since been admitted to the Scarba Home for Infants, Bondi.
New South Wales Police Gazette, 19 December 1923, p.659

Other women, like Sarah Boyd, went further and killed their baby. In November 1923 a group of children visiting the seaside discovered a suitcase containing the remains of a baby girl, who had been strangled. Police investigations led back to 39-year-old Boyd who had been seduced and abandoned by her lover. Boyd had a young son from a previous relationship and, due to ill health, she was unable to maintain steady employment. She was struggling financially and her situation became dire in the months leading up to the birth of her daughter. In her statement to police she said “I was desperate – I strangled it…I had no money and I had not got any word from its father”. Boyd then asked a friend, Jean Olliver, to help dispose of the body. They wrapped it, placed it in a suitcase and threw it from a Harbour ferry. The court found both women guilty and sentenced Olliver to 12 months gaol and Boyd to death with a recommendation of mercy. In 1927, after many sympathetic public petitions, Boyd was released from prison and reunited with her son.

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At various times over the last few months, I’ve been up in the museum loft, with Museum Studies intern Veronica Kooyman, poring over crime scene negatives from the 1950s. As a result of this experience my vision of that decade has been seriously revised. In Australian historiography, the 1950s are portrayed as an optimistic decade of steady employment and rising prosperity … cue grainy newsreel footage of whirring lawnmowers and cheerful nuclear families who have escaped inner city drudgery for the peace and privacy of a brand new bungalow on a leafy tree-lined street.

But as documented by the police, life in the suburbs often turns out to be dysfunctional, threadbare and violent. Photographs of interiors of the period repeatedly expose domestic settings of incredible squalor, dishevelment and clutter. The dingy, bedraggled ‘50s suburban cottage also transpires to be the site of some truly mind-boggling crimes. Their victims are often members of the same family.

At first I felt deep shock at the repeated instances of domestic suicide and murder we were encountering. It seemed as though every packet of negatives from this period contained its own tragic cargo of melancholy aftermaths: corpses in front to of gas ovens, or lying open-mouthed on double beds beside empty poison bottles, or hanging from a rope in a living-room doorway, or slumped in a pool of blood next to a recently discharged rifle.

Now, a month or two on from when we first started to look at this decade in some depth, these images of perpetrators and of victims, of apparently ordinary folks who could not take it anymore and suddenly snapped with terrible consequences for themselves and others have become sadly predictable. As I said at the beginning of this piece, my notion of the 1950s has been thoroughly revised. The ‘50s have lost their innocence for me. A nocturnal melancholy now hovers in the blinding light of a sun dappled lawn, and in the faces of those who occupy the house beyond, “marks of weakness, marks of woe”.

Photographed 3 June 1927 at the State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, NSW

The care and management of young offenders has always presented difficulties for the police and courts. Authorities are reluctant to send teenagers to prison and seek to give them an opportunity to turn their lives around. During the 1920s the courts would often place juvenile offenders in the care of church and charitable institutions if the parents were deemed unfit to care for them. Attempts would be made to remove female offenders from their friends by sending them to convents and homes in rural areas. This strategy was rarely successful and police records detail numerous ‘missing friends [persons]’ who had fled charitable homes in order to return to their criminal associates in the city.

Eileen O’Connor’s story is an old yet familiar one. It would appear that she came to the authorities’ attention as an ‘uncontrollable child’, a term often used by the courts to describe runaway children or those frequenting unsavoury places such as sly grog shops. O’Connor was placed in the care of the Salvation Army but soon fled and was reported missing by the Matron. Soon after, the seventeen year old began to make appearances in the New South Wales Police Gazette as a wanted person. She stole a wallet from a man, possibly as part of a prostitution scam, and a warrant for her arrest was issued. Within a month she was apprehended and sentenced to nine months hard labour at Long Bay.