From the loft

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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”.