The mid-70s was the beginning of Australia’s big expansion of tertiary education. A new university started in 1975 in Perth’s southern suburbs, Murdoch University, and I decided to enrol and do a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies. So I was a foundation student of the university, and this photo is from that first year when Murdoch had about 600 students. The most notable thing about the pic is the sheer absence of people. These days, the same scene would be crowded and lively.
How quiet was it? At first, coffee in the ref was free – just help yourself. Student numbers are now about 22,000 and the free coffee didn’t last long at all. In this photo, it looks idyllic, doesn’t it?
This is a scene of a university that simply doesn’t exist today. To what extent, then, do photographs romanticise all past events? Susan Sontag’s essays that became her book On Photography were being published at about this time. I’m pretty sure her work was mentioned in my uni courses. She wrote: “To take a photograph is to have an interest in things remaining as they are, at least for as long as it takes to get the photo.”
Photos freeze moments, and our memories of the context around the photo, or the times before and after, may be forever shaped by the snap selection of that particular framing and moment. So does the act of photography reflect an interest in things staying as they are? At the very least, it works to ensure that this is the case in our memories. Or, having recorded an image, are we then free to move on?
In another indication of the times, this is my Kombi that I bought for cash at the end of my gap year working for the mining company. Car models are great indicators of the passing of the years. If I had kept my old blue van, it would probably be a collector’s item now.
I had ceased keeping my handwritten metadata, and I cannot remember the camera settings for this pic. However, the blurred face on the bloke by the fire, but the reasonable sharpness in the rest of the photo suggests it was taken at about 1/15th or 1/30th of a second. I even have a vague memory of ensuring that the camera was braced against something solid, maybe a stump or a post. I have taken many photos with slow shutter speeds in this way when I have not had a tripod available.