After talking to a prospective publisher, the title of the manuscript has been changed from Bowden Archives and other Marginalia to The Bowden Archives. This cut down means that the book will be about Bowden as the non-Bowden images–eg., the coastal beaches, Port Adelaide, Adelaide hills etc– have now been pruned from the draft manuscript. They have been shifted to the historical section of the proposed Adelaide book.
I have been going through and scanning the 35mm negatives in the archive. The picture below is from the Kelly Dance–an evening of jigs and reels — that was put on by The Bush Dance Theatre:
boy at Kelly Dance
This evening was sometimes in the 1980s. Unfortunately, I cannot recall where the musical evening was held or when. Continue reading →
One of the places that I used to visit and photograph was Port Adelaide and along the Port River estuary. I was initially attracted to the architecture of the industrial and commercial sites along and nearby the polluted Port River, as these signified the drivers of modernity in South Australia. Both sides of the Port Adelaide River had been zoned as sites for industrial expansion and the industry that was there used the river as a drain. In the 1980s large sections along the banks of the river were empty sites, and they were, to all intents and purposes, edge lands. These, however, were not empty urban landscapes evacuated of people.
silos + Holden, Port Adelaide
Living in the suburbs, driving a Holden with free time at Port Adelaide for play is what the historical experience of being modern was in Adelaide. Those who were making the cars, the washing machines and the TV sets could also buy them.
Photography, if you like, was where art and the categories of everyday life met. This stood in marked contrast to the avant-garde at the Experimental Art Foundation, which along with the major art institutions and the practitioners of a post modernist staged and fictive modes of photography associated photography with a simplified and enfeebled realm of an outmoded pictorial style and a naive account of representation.
On their account realism, with its facile assumptions of visual transparency and deceptive form of natural representation equated realism with positivism’s view that the pictures of the world are in some uncomplicated sense reflections of the world. Realism was deemed to be out of date and second rate— it belonged to a dingy corner of a dusty Victorian cupboard—- rather than realism being viewed as a process of critical recovery and historical remembrance. Continue reading →
As Adelaide was in the process of becoming a post-industrial city haunted by the decline of its manufacturing industry and growing working-class disaffection its only genuine gathering place–or piazza— for people was the beach side suburb of Glenelg. It was a place where people accepted their differences to enjoy their leisure with picnics, bathing and walking in the sun.
Cruising Glenelg
The tram route from Victoria Square to Moseley Square in Glenelg was all that remained of Adelaide’s tramways network. This had been pulled up to make way for the motorcar. The tram was basically for tourists. During the summer the tram was packed with people going to and from the beach for a day’s outing. I would often catch it to Glenelg in the afternoon to hang out on the piazza with my cameras. Continue reading →
Past Futures is the working title for the third section of The Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia. This section maps the space outside of Adelaide’s CBD and Bowden-Brompton. It represents an escape from the confines of the city, sometimes in the form of day trips to the Adelaide Hills and Mt Lofty Ranges; trips to Melbourne and along the River Murray.
Escaping the confines of Bowden during the summer heat was necessary and I would often go to Adelaide’s coastal beaches in the late afternoon. I would usually park the Kombi at Largs Bay in the late afternoon and walk along the flat open stretch of sand to North Haven and back with Fichte, my standard poodle.
couple, Largs Bay
This was a time when people sunbathed on the beach and they didn’t really worry about effective sunscreen to prevent melanomas and skin cancer, even though the Slip, Slop, Slap! health campaign was launched in 1981 by the Cancer Council as part of its SunSmart campaign. The beach was a hedonistic holiday zone–a shared space of relaxation–with minimal shade from the burning sun. Continue reading →
These are a couple more Bowden portraits that supplement the ones currently in the Bowden portfolio on my website. I didn’t do many formal portraits.
As I mentioned in the Preface I worked part time at Conroys Smallgoods in Bowden to buy the camera equipment to photograph Bowden. I recall making several portraits in the factory after we had finished working on Saturday morning.
Joe, Conroys Smallgoods
Joe was the production foreman. He lived in the Salisbury/Elizabeth area of the northern suburbs of Adelaide. He worked long hours in the factory. It was a tough hard job.
I only made a few portraits of people in the city of Adelaide during the 1980s.
One place was Valentino’s Restaurant in Gays Arcade, off Adelaide Arcade, near Twin Street. My sister used to work there as a waitress whilst she was studying at Flinders University of South Australia for a social workers degree. I got to know the people working there, as I used to drop in for a quick meal when I’d been strolling around the CBD, reading the street, and photographing in the city as if I were a tourist visiting Adelaide.
Reno, Valentino’s Restaurant
The meals were cheap then. $5.50 with a glass of wine. In many ways it was a taken for granted space of a given historical period infused with meanings, experiences and memories; part of the patchwork quilt of traces of human existence that makes a city more than its buildings, transportation networks, rivers, and parks. Continue reading →
The late 198os and early 1990s in Adelaide was a period after the 1980s property boom and during ‘the recession we had to have’. I was living alone and working long hours tutoring and cleaning (early morning and evening) in order to keep up the mortgage payments on the cottage. The high interest rates meant that the good times were no longer rolling. Keeping the cottage during the recession meant the end of my photography as I had neither the time nor the money for it.
older man, Adelaide
One aftermath of the 1990s recession in South Australia was that many workers who had become unemployed during the recession were unable to be re-employed in their old, or in a similar, job. Over time many of these people simply gave up any hope of ever finding appropriate employment and slowly slipped into the ranks of the hidden unemployed. Continue reading →
