Calm before the storm

OF all the exhibitions on at the moment, one of the most unexpectedly rewarding is An Edwardian Summer at the Museum of Sydney.

OF all the exhibitions on at the moment, one of the most unexpectedly rewarding is An Edwardian Summer at the Museum of Sydney.

Selections from a family photographic archive, and shots mostly of children, domestic occasions and friends on picnics in the country 100 years ago, may sound as if they would be of historical and sociological interest at best. In fact, however, they are surprisingly absorbing, in part because of the time and subject matter, but mostly because of the skill of the photographer who took the pictures.

Arthur Wigram Allen -- no relation of mine -- was born into an important Sydney family in 1862 and died in 1941. The Allens were the founders of what is still one of the city's greatest legal firms, had considerable wealth from investments in property and shares, and were also involved in politics and philanthropy. The boys were generally educated at Sydney Grammar School and although most of them went to England for university, Arthur studied law at Trinity College, University of Melbourne.

He had to take control of the family law firm and its various business interests in 1885, at the age of only 23, when his father and uncle both died unexpectedly. Some years later he married and in the course of the 1890s had four children, who subsequently appear in the photographs at all stages of their childhood.

Despite his considerable responsibilities, Allen was evidently fascinated by the natural and social world all around him, including new technological inventions (he drove an electric car until the end of his life), and found time to take and develop many thousands of photographs, all of which were carefully numbered and collected in albums eventually given to the Mitchell Library.

On one level, the pictures are a remarkable record of life in Australia in the Edwardian period, which was a kind of golden age for our country: Federation had joined the old independent colonies into a commonwealth, and its citizens were energised by the pride and responsibility of building a new nation. Our standard of living was the highest in the world and, as in the US, working-class people could aspire to own property. There was no inkling of the nightmares to come: the Great War, the Depression and then World War II, which between them would blight the lives of two generations.

The Museum of Sydney has accordingly built an Edwardian exhibition around the photographs. There are contemporary paintings, illustrated newspapers and posters for comparison. Above all there are costumes of the period, furniture, children's toys and other objects of material culture. They are well chosen and relevant to the photographs; in many cases, objects are presented that match those that appear in the pictures.

Nonetheless, there is some incongruity between the pictures and the objects, an awkwardness in the juxtaposition that is impossible to overlook but not easy to explain.

It is not that the objects are inappropriate, but rather they are just too material, too concrete and finite. The photographs represent a distillation of the same world into something more abstract, like the images that live in memory. The materiality of the costumes jars with the immaterial, poetic order of Allen's photographs.

Before considering what it is that endows the pictures with this exceptional quality, it is worth looking at the world and people they represent. It is an upper-middle-class milieu of generally wealthy people, with visiting aristocrats and celebrities making guest appearances. There are occasional images that remind us the family was rich, as with the charming photograph of the coach and coachman waiting while the children build a sandcastle on a deserted Bondi Beach in 1901. But such glimpses serve only to remind us how relatively inconspicuous the family's wealth generally remains within the corpus of Allen's work.

This is an entirely different world from that of the newly rich who try to impress by flaunting cars and houses they have acquired on credit. It is different, too, from the contemporary consumer who is trained to believe that the more you consume, the more you are. This is a family that actually owns property, and employs servants, cooks and drivers because such is the social norm for people of their class; that entertains frequently and even lavishly, and yet does not appear to be ostentatious or indulgent. None of these pictures is self-congratulating or self-aggrandising; on the contrary, they are intimate and unpretentious. What is striking is that they are about others: about a wide and generous network of family and friends, and particularly about the enjoyment of the natural environment. Time and again groups of friends are seen sitting on rocks overlooking a view or gathered around an Edwardian picnic table in the shade on a hot day (it is not just that they are wearing suits that surprises us, but that they manage to look cool and fresh despite this).

Many of the pictures, of course, are devoted to the growing children. The ones of Allen's daughter Joyce are particularly engaging. We see her reading a book on her seventh birthday in 1900, oblivious to the camera, and it reminds us that the most valuable aspect of bourgeois culture, if there is such a thing, is its emphasis on education and the leisure that allows for the development of an inner life of ideas and imagination. Later, in 1904, we see her splashing a little boy called Fritz in the water at Moombara, the family's beachside house at Port Hacking -- a picture that not only reveals a joyful spontaneity in her nature but displays Allen's feel for timing in capturing such moments -- and the following year about to dive into the pool at Moombara.

Denis, later an RAF pilot in World War I as well as partner in the family firm, is seen as a little boy with his cousin Dundas, paddling in ankle-deep water and contemplating a small group of model steamers beached on the lapping water's edge; it is Christmas Day 1903 and these boats are presumably newly unwrapped presents. Many years afterwards, in 1915, we find him lying in a hammock in the ballroom at the family's Woollahra house, Merioola, which much later, during and after World War II, became an artists' colony before being demolished in 1952.

Of course this vision of family life is a partial one, and there is no hint of the whole inner universe of emerging sexual life in the family's children. In some of the adult women we sense a bottled-up sexuality that has been denied expression. But in general this absence feels less like repression than simply the demarcation of a level of personal and private life into which one would not presume to intrude. This is not to say the family members were all free from neurosis or any other disturbances, but that the omission of this aspect of life does not imbue the pictures with overt tension; in fact, they are consistently serene.

The serenity of these images is in fact what is most interesting. There is a certain balance between humanity and distance in them that may have been characteristic of the man himself; apparently, although so fond of entertaining, Allen preferred to communicate through written notes rather than face to face, and left an immense archive of correspondence at his death. He is so self-effacing that there is hardly a single picture of himself in his albums; one, in which he is seen enjoying a picnic with his brother Boyce, is annotated: "I think it is the only picture in my books in which I appear and I hope it will be the last."

The sympathetic interest in his subjects is attested in the annotations to the photographs, which are transcribed in the exhibition, while many of the books themselves are open in cabinets, often allowing us to compare the original proof with the enlarged image on the wall. But for an artist, sympathy has to be tempered by the detachment that can select the best moment from the continuum of movement or construct the most telling composition. Such is the peculiar presence of the artistic mind, attuned simultaneously to the subject and to the artifice of its transformation.

It is this gift of presence, attention and receptiveness that makes Allen such a good photographer. The compositions seem effortlessly clear, economical and dynamic, and the people he pictures almost always seem relaxed, as though they know they can trust him. Tonally too, he has a remarkable sense of the picture as a composition of blacks, whites and shades of grey, so the crisp lights and darks that define the pictorial shape are complemented by more subtle tones in subordinate parts.

Thus the everyday world of the Edwardian period is transformed into something like a dream or memory, something reminiscent of the fictional world we encounter in the novels of Henry James or Edith Wharton; and this is why the photographs have a resonance, a charge of human meaning, entirely lacking from the period artefacts.

Allen's process, like that of any artist, distils the raw material of the everyday into abstract or poetic ideas. At their best, they can be very memorable, such as the picture of the young woman looking through a telescope at the departing HMS Powerful (1907), or the photograph of Cecil Healy rowing a dinghy at Port Hacking in 1904. This picture is on the cover of the excellent book produced to accompany the exhibition, and which allows you to ponder the images without distraction. More material, incidentally, can be found in the online Wigram Allen collection at the State Library.

In such images, as when the muse takes over from and speaks through the poet, we feel the artist as the historical individual Arthur Wigram Allen replaced by some more impersonal agency that synthesises the feelings and experience of the time. The picture of Healy speaks of silence but also of being lost, of rowing out into nothingness. The view of Hastings at the Lookout (1899), like a more casual reprise of a theme from Caspar David Friedrich, evokes Australia on the eve of Federation.

But the remarkable 1904 picture of a man -- presumably Allen himself -- seen from the back and looking out at the wild sea in another Friedrich-like composition, seems to look forward prophetically to the storms of the new century.

An Edwardian Summer
Museum of Sydney, until April 26