In 1974, Melbourne publisher Outback Press produced a small book that almost felt like a magazine, perhaps even a fanzine: Into the Hollow Mountains. The book’s cover boldly offered a subtitle: “Photographs by Robert Ashton”.
Even with this overt labelling, the actual work – a celebration of a vigorous working-class suburb evolving before the rest of Melbourne’s eyes into a countercultural marvel of cheap “fixer-uppers”, bohemian share houses and wonders like the Free Store – didn’t feel like a photographic collection first and foremost.
Multi-authored, with many of its pages unadorned by text, Ashton’s two-to-a-page photographs were interstices to a message summed up in the punchline of the last page. It held the anti-gentrification poem Get out of Fitzroy, by the poet soon to become known as Π.O. (Pi.O) which reads in part: “TRENDIES / You’ve called in CULTURE / closed down our greek cinemas / pulled down street shelters”.
Review: Fitzroy 1974 - Robert Ashton (Hardie Grant Books)
Ashton’s new book, Fitzroy 1974, is the old one reconfigured, to give his images and ideas room to breathe. Here we can see whole sequences that were represented by just one shot in Hollow Mountains. These include photographs Ashton had believed irretrievably damaged during the development process, but which were saved and have been restored.
Now, instead of feeling like illustrations of the original pieces by writers Helen Garner, Colin Talbot, Mark Gillespie or Damien Sharp (not that their work was not extremely good company), the handsome new publication, with new words from Lorin Clarke and Tony Birch, showcases the images and their varied content.
The kids in this book are close to retirees in 2024 and few of the adults are with us anymore. Fitzroy 1974 is thus an archive of a distant past.
The original book was equal parts news bulletin, protest, consciousness-raiser and celebration of future possibility. We all know, now, that “possibility” was ultimately little more than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for adventurous youngsters to recalibrate and expand small, often grim 19th-century two-bedroom cottages into boutique showpieces for much smaller and wealthier households.
Low-waged Fitzrovians were offered inducements to relocate, or were simply evicted, within a decade of Ashton’s recording of their close-knit communities.
Candid shots
Fifty years ago, having a camera and taking photographs in public meant much more than it does now. Being captured on film was redolent with meaning and required a certain posture, composure or pose. That said, it was probably not so unusual to be photographed in Fitzroy as you were going about your daily business in the ‘70s: as an object of interest for university students or documentarians, or amateur chroniclers grabbing a taste of the exotic.
Many of the subjects in this book – we don’t know what Ashton told them he was doing, but surely he explained he was documenting everyday Fitzroy people – are looking straight into the camera. For a split-second, they are the centre of a world.
Many others are captured apparently candidly and spontaneously: a group of card players at a table behind glass reflecting the Atherton Gardens public housing towers in Brunswick Street, for instance.
The Atherton precinct had been proclaimed a reclamation area in 1965, which meant demolition was assured. Incentive for improvements or renovations were thereby eliminated and the quick decline, then demolition of the area was and remains a sore point for many locals.
The towers, replacing housing deemed salvageable with the aim of rescuing the downtrodden from unscrupulous landlords, were shiny and new: the last of the four was built in 1971.
In Ashton’s pictures of this terrain, the buildings themselves and the playgrounds around them provide an intriguing backdrop to the century-old shops and houses peering out at a vast open space recently created. That space is not a void: it’s a creative area in itself, and local residents (children, adults) and others (performers, for instance) embrace its possibilities.
In this regard, his images of Atherton Gardens are a celebration of community. It’s notable too that, as Tony Birch writes in his introduction, the kids in these pictures aren’t “forlornly waiting around to be saved by outsiders”. They’re just getting on with it.
A celebration of public life
In the main, Ashton’s book is a celebration of public life in Fitzroy. While he does enter a few private premises – largely, the bedrooms and living spaces of his artistic contemporaries, most of them young and Anglo-Australian – Ashton is not embarking on an expose of a seamy underbelly, as social reformer Oswald Barnett or the Brotherhood of St Laurence had attempted 40 years earlier.
This is how people choose to be seen, and in that regard some of the most fascinating images are of people dwelling at the boundaries of public and private. Women outside their houses, but behind low walls or fences, for instance, or social activities inside clubs or pubs, or churches.
These are local people who are very much ensconced in the Venn diagram of their wider community and their ethnic, religious or other self-selected affiliations. No doubt many outsiders in 1974 saw this aspect of Fitzroy as an antidote to introverted suburbanism.
Society in true middle-ring suburbs was conducted behind closed doors. In a 19th-century area like Fitzroy, decisively pre-automobile, social life was necessarily much more likely to be out in the open.
There’s one more element to Fitzroy 1974 that needs acknowledgment: Ashton is a very good photographer. Many of these images are sumptuous, and he has an empathic, artistic eye. As mentioned, his subjects often take the camera on, one-to-one; the image on the cover of the book, of locals Cecil Coombs, Alma Morgan and Daisy Clayton, is one he must surely have treasured.
The picture of Allan McDonald Lovett flexing his muscles – used on the original book’s cover – represents, as Birch says, “male bravado on display […] with a self-conscious sense of theatre”.
Sensitivity, good humour, scenarios which might almost have been staged – but almost certainly weren’t. Fitzroy 1974 captures it all.
David Nichols does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
