Brenda L. Croft, photography, 2003, Man about town, Melbourne
Summary
In her 2003 series ‘Man About Town’, Brenda Croft continued her practice of mining her family's personal archives to uncover stories that are both deeply private yet have a wider significance. In this case, Croft drew on images she found while sorting through her father's belongings following his death. Contained in a small room in the Aboriginal hostel where he had been living for a short period just prior to his death, these images were discovered in their original Kodachrome slide box, placed inside a shoe box of papers. Unaccompanied by any identifying documentation like stills from a never completed film, the artist and the viewer can only imagine the stories that surround each photograph, taken mostly in mid-1950s Melbourne. The subject in several images is Croft’s father but the identity of the original photographer is unclear. Having spoken with Harry Hack, a friend of her father’s, Croft believes the photographer was one of her father's work colleagues from the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme who he was holidaying with. Croft believes he visited Melbourne for the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics and certainly that date, or some point during 1957, ties in well with images such as the individually titled ‘Man About Town’ image. This captures the view looking east along Lonsdale Street, with the skeletal streel structure of ICI Building mid-construction as focal point. The ICI Building was completed in 1958.
