Detail from the mosaic in the State Library of NSW by the Melocco Brothers.Credit: Janie Barrett
Most young people are told to look up. Not Victoria Hynes, whose late grandfather Peter Melocco’s mosaic flooring once decorated hundreds of public buildings in Sydney.
As a child, Hynes was taken on walks through Sydney’s CBD to see the work of Peter and his brothers, Antonio and Galliano, known as the Melocco Brothers. It was everywhere, she said, from “the Hogwarts-like splendour” of the State Theatre to banks, Dymocks and big department stores.
“Look down,” her mother said when they visited the crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral and the State Library’s Mitchell vestibule to see one of the library’s treasures, the Tasman map created in mosaic.
Zeny Edwards, author of a new book about the Meloccos, said the contribution of the Italian-born brothers to the country’s cultural and architectural heritage had, like that of many migrants, been grossly overlooked.
They had elevated architecture into art. Edwards described it as “painting in stone”, which is the book’s title.
Sitting on a bench with Hynes, overlooking the library’s mosaic representing the travels by Abel Tasman in 1642 and 1644, Edwards said it was “an amazing and complete work of art”.
Often called the Bonaparte map, the Tasman mural’s four by 5.5 metres was realised in Australian Wombeyan marble and terrazzo. It features compasses, whales, monsters, pink cherubs and rolling waves edged in brass.
The Melocco mural in Central Station has been restored after it was damaged by a fire in 2015. Credit: Dean Sewell
An architectural historian who has also written a biography of Sir John Sulman, Edwards said the Meloccos’ work was embedded in the architecture of Australia – painted in “mosaic, terrazzo, sgraffito, scagliola”.
It is an ancient art that is dying out. “It is just too expensive,” Edwards said. “It was all done by hand, by hundreds of people laying each stone by stone.”
The Meloccos’ team completed the State Library mosaic in 18 months during the early years of the Second World War.
Historian Zeny Edwards (left) has written a book about the mosaics of the Melocco Brothers, including this example in the State Library of NSW. Credit: Janie Barrett
According to Edwards’ research, some of their Italian workers were considered enemy aliens and returned to internment camps after the work was complete.
Hynes’ grandfather was interned too, only to be released after intervention by top politicians of the day, Kim Beazley snr and Arthur Calwell.
The Meloccos’ art was everywhere. Yet Edwards and Hynes said acknowledgment of the brothers’ contribution was “grossly lacking”.
Edwards writes that the Meloccos’ work is everywhere in Sydney’s CBD. Most Sydneysiders had walked on the terrazzo mosaic floor while buying a ticket at Central Station, she said. It was in the marble at David Jones and the old Mark Foys department store, and the scagliola columns of the old Commonwealth Bank (now headquarters of Macquarie Group) in Martin Place.
Hynes said her grandfather came to Australia in 1908 with only 10 shillings, later bringing his brothers from the Italian village of Toppo in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.
Painting with Stone, The Story of the Melocco Brothers, by Zeny Edwards, will be launched by Bob Carr, chair of Museums of History, NSW at the State Library of NSW on May 9.
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