Once I’d purchased a VW Kombi I was able to make little road trips outside of the city, I started exploring around the Adelaide Hills and the Mt Lofty Ranges. I was stunned to see how small the city … Read More
The beach is more than a space for people to walk, sunbath and swim. It has a past and a future and this indicates that the sand dunes and the fragile dune vegetation are in need different forms of coastal … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
I photographed a lot of the commercial architecture around Bowden-Brompton. The photography was before the rejuvenation of the area started to reverse the continual decline in the population from 1947 to the 1980s, due to the intrusion of new industries … Read More
The suburbs west of the city of Adelaide and the parklands, such as Hindmarsh and Bowden, were earmarked as industrial areas prior to 1945 because they were in the vicinity of the road and rail links between Adelaide’s CBD … Read More
The graffiti in Bowden during the 1980s was often quite blunt and direct with no ambiguity in the message: I interpreted it as the signs of the increasing emphasis on law and order as a response to the local residents /industry politics, … Read More
The residential architecture in industrial Bowden prior to its recent gentrification consisted of cheaply built working class cottages. They were dark inside, full of salt damp during the winter and hothouses in the summer. This housing had no insulation and … Read More
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 … Read More
In his essay ‘Australian Made’ in Each Wild Idea: Writing , Photography, History (2000) Geoffrey Batchen contests the view that Australian photography after 1945 was a dependent shadow of trends in the United States. He says that this assumption underpins … Read More