From the loft » 1940s

Accident on Catherine Street, Kogarah

Holly Schulte — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 23:05:24 +0000

The police photography of motor accident scenes developed from the one or two frame approach to many shots, giving a more comprehensive view of the incident. By the mid-1940s, police photographers were documenting the general location of an accident, the damaged vehicles in situ, different viewpoints and close-up details. The photographs helped investigators to determine whether any law had been violated and, if required, the images were presented as evidence in court.

In October 1949 The Australian Police Journal published a bulletin, which highlights the then emerging approach to accident scene photography.

One good picture of the entire accident scene serves to orient observers and locate objects with respect to permanent markers. Others may give details. Skid marks, point of impact, position of vehicles, view obstructions, traffic control devices, or damaged vehicles should be photographed when they are of value to the case.

F.B.I Law Enforcement Bulletin, October 1949, ‘Accident Investigation’, The Australian Police Journal, Volume 3, Number 4, page 339

This series of photographs was taken on 13 August 1949 after a fatal accident on Catherine Street, Kogarah. Police Photographer Groom attended the accident scene and produced eight negatives showing the site of impact from various distances, the damaged vehicle (including detail shot) and a number of bystanders lining the street.

Accident on Catherine Street, Kogarah. 1949. Police Photographer Groom (FP08_0238)

misadventure by motor car

Holly Schulte — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 04:19:46 +0000

The Archive Gallery has been transformed for the archive’s latest offering Collision: misadventure by motor car.

This exhibition presents previously unseen traffic accident photographs taken by police between 1920 and 1964. Recent research on the archive reveals that after the mid-1940s the police approach to photographing accident sites becomes more comprehensive – expanding from one or two shots to a whole series of images. The resulting photographs helped investigators establish the cause of an incident and, if required, were presented in court.

One gallery wall also shows the ways police have been involved in traffic regulation and road safety. The photographs illustrate a range of police activity, from directing traffic at a bustling intersection to teaching children safe road skills. Also included in this selection is the demonstration of New South Wales first radar set, or speed camera, that operated in Sydney from November 1954.

The exhibition opens on Saturday 19 March 2011. Visit the Archive Gallery page for more details.

Rooms

Peter Doyle — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:16:24 +0000

A window in the upstairs bedroom rattles in its frame, and the shamus knows that his enemies are coming for him. It’s a gentle but potent image, as though the house itself had taken a sharp breath. It’s from Dashiell Hammett’s story, the ‘House on Turk Street’. It replays one of the oldest riffs in crime narrative: the seeming complicity of built places in the crimes that happen within them.

Violent domestic crime explodes within and into space – emotions hitherto unspoken become suddenly manifest. Bodies move haphazardly around rooms, stumble against furniture, trip here, collapse there, come to rest awkwardly on a bed, on a floor. That hitherto sweet refuge now is part of the crime. A witness and a participant.

“MAN AND WIFE FOUND DEAD / Flat Tragedy at Waverley.” So reports the Sydney Morning Herald of Thursday, 4 May, 1944. Maurice Reuben John Anderson, a pilot officer and Alice Cabella Anderson, his wife, had been found the night before in the bedroom of their Birrell Street flat, dead from gunshot wounds.

Lights had burned all through the previous day, and a radio had continued to play. Early in the evening a neighbour peeked through a window and saw that things were wrong. He phoned the police. The report goes on:

Four detectives went to the flat, climbed in a window and found the bodies lying on the bedroom floor.

Investigations led the police to form the opinion that while Mrs Anderson was seated on a chair in the lounge she was shot.

A trail of blood indicated that as she jumped up from the chair she knocked it over and then staggered towards the door.

The detectives think that Anderson caught hold of her, knocking the wireless set against a sideboard. He then dragged her into the bedroom and as she slumped dead on the floor he shot himself. He fell across his wife’s body and the revolver was found under him.

With the discovery not happening until Wednesday evening, the Herald reporter would have been hard pressed to make the deadline for Thursday’s paper – traditionally on the streets at midnight. Yet the description he got from the police accords perfectly with the photographic evidence: the sprays and smears of blood, the wireless knocked against the sideboard. The bodies in the bedroom too are arranged exactly the way the police had described; the barrel of Anderson’s pistol can be seen poking out from under his right trouser cuff.

The Andersons, who had moved in only a week before, had been in buoyant spirits earlier that day. They had hung out the washing together. We can see from the photos that the table has been modestly laid for bread and tea. There’s an untouched slice of (apple?) pie, a tobacco tin and a spent match on a plate. There are framed portraits of the Andersons on the mantel shelf. At some point things had gone badly wrong. These photos appeared in City of Shadows, listed as “no details known”. Only much later did we turn up a reference in the NSW Police Gazette, which lists the killings as the murder of Alice, by Maurice, followed by the latter’s suicide. In the absence of any hard information, the most common interpretation that readers of City of Shadows gave the pictures was indeed a crime of passion murder-suicide. An accusation or admission of infidelity perhaps, followed by the killings.

Our eyes are drawn as much to the objects and the setting as they are to the shocking subject at the centre. Every humdrum item and piece of bric a brac is given equal value in the composition, and so invested with a charged, but unspecified importance. Figure and ground are in near equilibrium. The traces of everyday domestic routine and the petty emblems of marital life present an obvious, mocking counterpoint to the corpses. A movie art director would probably consider it way too heavy handed. Yet there it is.

One last thing: the photographs highlight the claustrophobic dimensions of the domestic space. There was an acute wartime housing shortage in Sydney at the time, and many perfectly respectable couples were forced to squat in derelict houses, or camp out in Moore Park, or sleep rough elsewhere. We might wonder how much the space itself contributed to the events. Dashiell Hammett’s gumshoe is at first baffled by the House on Turk Street, where nothing is what it first seems. In the end though the house itself comes to his aid, and warns him of the mortal danger. Not so the house on Birrell Street: it seems to have had it in for the Andersons.