Resurrecting a Sense Of Place—PictureAustralia: Ourtown
acaffery (Anthony Caffery)
Comet McNaught over Australia’s
Capital City, Canberra
Flickr-link
Somaya
Lyneham Trolleylove July 2006 ['out the back
of the Lyneham shops']
Flickr-link
ashroc
Capitol Theatre, Manuka c.1955 ['this building
no longer exists in 2007']
Flickr-link
unknown photographer
Wombat Hill, Daylesford
reproduced courtesy State Library of Victoria, image number a07021
State Library of Victoria
gervo1865_2
Wombat Hill, Daylesford
Flickr-link
sandown
Bowraville, NSW Australia c.1970
Flickr-link/
Rossco (R. & V. Photographers)
Support ['The timber supports
used in the Catherine Hill Bay coal loader; this wharf now lays abandoned']
Flickr-link
The National Library of Australia invites the community to add their perspectives on Australia’s rural and urban spaces, to juxtapose the contemporary with the historical, and to illustrate domestic and work spaces by contributing images to the new Flickr group, PictureAustralia: Ourtown. The new group continues the successful partnership between the Library’s PictureAustralia service and Yahoo!’s Flickr photo-sharing service begun in 2006. Images loaded into either the PictureAustralia: People, Place and Events or Ourtown groups are harvested on a weekly basis into PictureAustralia’s collection.
Small regional libraries and historical societies are strongly encouraged to contribute images of their town through the PictureAustralia Flickr groups. People are also encouraged to select only the very best images of greatest benefit to building this comprehensive record of Australia’s visual history. We are seeking photographs that have, as Roland Barthes states, the ‘functions: to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke desire’ (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
PictureAustralia: Ourtown is building an intimate national album compiled by individuals around the country recording their associations to the spaces that they inhabit. Since the group’s launch last Canberra Day, 20 March, 86 people have added more than 600 images to the nation’s richest online pictorial resource, www.pictureaustralia.org. Canberra Day was chosen as the launch date to encourage photographers in the nation’s capital, previously underrepresented, to add their images to PictureAustralia. Canberra photographers have responded positively, providing visual documentation of the city’s contemporary, historical, monumental and domestic life. For an example of the monumental, ‘acaffery’ captured the passage of the Comet McNaught over the city before it receded forever into the outer solar system. Somaya provides a gritty glimpse of the capital’s domestic life, while ‘ashroc’ has added historical images of Canberra’s lost heritage.
The take-up of Web2.0 social software such as Flickr.com, MySpace or YouTube is an interesting phenomenon. They evoke in part the quest for alternative systems for collective debate, distribution and exhibition of cultural products. These new social softwares of the twenty-first century represent a technological counterculture movement in the form of online communities, where individuals seek to move from being spectators to active participants in the media and to challenge the dominance of the mass media industry.
History-making suddenly becomes a proactive exercise, as photographers seek out viewpoints that provide an ever-expanding general history of representations. This multiple approach to storytelling builds layers of meaning, providing a richer understanding of the impact of the present on the past and vice versa. The construction of past events occurs in the present. Narrative crafts both the real and the imagined to produce the appearance of truth. This multitude of divergent views within a local context provides anti-histories that challenge the traditional premise of histories as singular and homogenous.
Salman Rushdie stated in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), ‘It may be argued that the past is a country, from which we have all emigrated and that its loss is part of our common humanity.’ From the outset of the PictureAustralia’s Flickr groups, members began resurrecting historical images already in the collection and seeking out their contemporary viewpoints. One recent example from the Ourtown group is ‘gervo1865_2’s’ essays on time from Daylesford in Victoria. Here ‘gervo’ refers to PictureAustralia images from the State Library of Victoria and pastes over a tear in time of nearly a hundred years, uploading contemporary images of the same sites and presenting them as one moment in relation to another. Tags added to the images become integrated into the classification and retrieval of the images within PictureAustralia.
Flickr members have also continued to generously reveal their private photo collections to the gaze of the nation, such as the 1970 photo of Bowraville shared by ‘sandown’.
One of Australia’s most dearly cherished traditional narratives is the story of the labour movement and the land of the ‘fair go’. Flickr photographers are encouraged to upload images of people at work to assist with gaining a record of our changing work environments.
The media have been very supportive of the Ourtown project, clearly recognising the fact that it is something that everyone can get involved with. Ourtown has received coverage in over 45 articles in the press and on 11 radio stations (especially in the regional areas of NSW, QLD and SA), and has reached some 626 031 people.
The success of the Library’s Flickr project is evidenced by the fact that there are now Flickr photographers in every city and in virtually every country town across Australia. These people are entering their certificates of presence into PictureAustralia’s collection on a daily basis. The staff at the National Library would like to thank the more than 700 individuals who have joined PictureAustralia’s two Flickr groups for their support in building this immensely rich new collection that today contains over 20 000 pictures.
See PictureAustralia to discover how to upload and find your images.
Fiona Hooton
PictureAustralia