In The Shadows

‘This disease is an enemy of the people, just as much as was any force the men of this nation met in physical combat.’ (Commonwealth Tuberculosis Bill, 1948)

Tuberculosis (TB) patients rest along the verandah to ensure they receive maximum exposure to fresh air and sunshine, having been forced into isolation for months as part of a disease control measure Australia adopted in the late 1940s. Known as consumption, or TB, the bacterial lung infection leaves patients coughing up infected lung tissue, and the bacteria can spread among people living in close proximity or in unsanitary conditions.

Quarantining patients from their families for up to a year while they hopefully recovered was the only option government’s had to control an epidemic which had killed 27% of Australians aged between 20 and 40 in 1946. Chalets were built across Victoria, sometimes with flyscreens instead of glass as a way to circulate fresh air. A mandatory chest x-ray, a bovine vaccine and antibiotics were introduced not long after, but overall, improved sanitation is often cited as the main cause of the disease’s decline in Australia. 

On 13 July 1936 at 3:35 am, two bombs were thrown through the window of a family home in a quiet Geelong street. The intended victim, Senior Constable Frederick Milne, escaped serious physical injury, however his wife, Aimee Isabel Milne, was hit directly by the second explosion. Milne spent several weeks in hospital suffering from deafness, concussion and severe shock. No-one was ever convicted for the murder, but there were many suspects. Milne was a well-known police officer and had enemies in Geelong’s underbelly. He had many run-ins with George Edward Carr, an infamous petty criminal with a string of charges to his name. Carr was facing fraud charges and was suing Milne for wrongful arrest at the time of the explosion. During the inquest investigation, Milne claimed to have received threats from Carr.

This photograph, submitted to the coronial inquiry, shows the extent of the devastation left by the bombs. The morning sun shines through the exposed boards leaving an eerie pattern of light on what remains of the sitting room.

Inquests have been digitised to 1925 and can be found on our website. (See our inquests topic page for more information.)

This is the Altona Refinery, 13 km west of Melbourne. It commenced operations in June 1949 and still operates today. The photograph was originally created by the Commonwealth Department of Trade for promotional purposes to stimulate overseas investment, export and tourism. The department employed a large number of ‘outsiders’, including advertising specialists and commercial artists like Wolfgang Sievers.

Sievers was born in Berlin in 1913. In 1938, he was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an aerial photographer; but before he began service he fled Germany for Melbourne, where he became a commercial photographer. In 1942, Sievers enlisted with the Australian Army and served until 1946. After demobilisation, he returned to photography, developing corporate clientele among manufacturers and architectural firms. In 1950 he started working for the Trade Publicity Branch. Sievers’s work was influenced by the Bauhaus and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movements that espoused simplicity of form and functionality, reconciled with artistic flair and spirit. His photography is considered ‘theatrical’; he often photographed scenes at night or with high contrast and shadow to heighten the artistic nature of the industrial environment.

At the start of World War II, Melbourne’s citizens felt far removed from the dangers of the front line, with hardly anyone taking the government’s efforts at air raid drills very seriously. However, attitudes started to change once local newspapers were filled with images and stories of the London Blitz, and the Bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942. The fear of an invasion became so real that large numbers of Melburnians were stepping forward to join volunteer services such as the decontamination and rescue squads or the amateur firefighters.

The modern woman of the 1920s was confident, independent and keen to partake in activities previously considered ‘inappropriate’. Tobacco companies quickly exploited this change in social mores and started advertising directly to women, portraying cigarettes as symbols of emancipation and equality with men. By the 1930s, you can see how heavily women were targeted in this window display outside a train station barber shop.

Craven ‘A’, for example, was famous for their illustrations of sophisticated women and the tag line ‘for your throat’s sake’. They claimed that their cork tips made smoking ‘cleaner’ and would prevent sore throats. The implication was that if iit felt milder, then it must be healthier, but in reality filters did little to stop the harmful chemicals. It took until 1973 before health warnings were required on all cigarette packs in Australia.  

Bushfires have long cast a shadow of danger over Victorian summers. Each year as the weather heats up and the environment dries out, communities in regional and rural Victoria are faced with the possibility of another bushfire turning the landscape to ash. In the 1926 bushfires – the most destructive of which became known as the Black Sunday bushfire – swept through Gippsland during February and into March, resulting in the loss of 60 lives and many homes. Only two years after this devastating summer, bushfires struck the region again.

In this photo, a man deals with the destruction caused by one of the 1928 fires along the Princes Highway, captured by the Photographic Services Section of the Country Roads Board (CRB). Through the first half of the twentieth century the CRB produced a vast collection of photographs of roads and bridges throughout Victoria, capturing people and snippets of everyday life among photos of infrastructure construction. The scorched landscape and lingering smoke haze depicted in this photo is the kind of daunting scene many Victorians have encountered in the aftermath of bushfires.

These Vietnamese families (names unknown) were among the thousands of new immigrants offered temporary accommodation at the Nunawading Migrant Hostel in Melbourne’s east between 1952 and 1987. It was the first home offered to many Vietnamese refugees fleeing southern Vietnam to avoid life under communist rule. In 1978, Huy Truong’s family joined an overcrowded boat to cross the Arafura Sea to Darwin. 'What crystallised the decision for us to leave was my father was ... [told to] sign a letter that gratefully handed over all the assets including our home ... to the government,' he says. (‘We came by boat’, SMH, 10 September 2013). Once in Australia, Truong's family applied for refugee status.

Vietnamese communities in Melbourne formed in suburbs surrounding Nunawading and other migrant hostels, including Enterprise in Springvale, Midway in Maribyrnong and Wiltona in Altona. Refugees arriving by boat today fall under a mandatory detention policy introduced by the Keating Labor Government in 1992, to discourage boat arrivals and upheld by successive governments. In 2013 the Australian Government extended that policy by denying any asylum seeker arriving by boat the right to settle in Australia as a refugee.