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World War I war ships at Garden Island awaiting demolition
World War I war ships at Garden Island awaiting demolition

World War I war ships at Garden Island awaiting demolition

Photographer (Australian, 1878 - 1953)
Date1922
Object number00054634
NamePhotograph
MediumGelatin silver print
DimensionsOverall: 183 × 273 mm
Display dimensions: 435 × 590 mm
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineANMM Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anne Christoffersen, in memory of the artist
DescriptionThis image, taken from a boat shows two men in a small boat in the foreground rowing past several large RAN ships at Garden Island. It was published under the title of Garden Island in Australian Beautiful Sydney Number 1928. It shows RAN vessels HMAS Pioneer and HMAS Psyche alongside Garden Island, awaiting disposal and is dated 1922 on the verso. Both ships left Garden Island, Sydney in 1922. HMAS Pysche was decommissioned in 1918 and remained moored in Sydney Harbour until 1922, when it was purchased for use as a timber lighter and moved to Port Stephens where it sank in 1940. HMAS Pioneer was decommissioned in 1916, but used as an accommodation hulk at Garden Island until 1922. In May 1923 it was handed over to Cockatoo Dockyard by the Disposals Board when the work of stripping it down to a bare hull began. Its hull was scuttled off Sydney on 18 February 1931.HistoryHarold Cazneaux was working first as an artist-retoucher at Hammer Studio in the 1890s (He was born in 1878, was only 13 when his mother died in 1892) and had a low opinion of the formulaic studio portraiture. He was inspired to pursue art photography in the 1890s in Adelaide after seeing local work by John Kauffman and imported examples of the new impressionistic art photography movement known as Pictorial Photography. He moved to Sydney in 1904 and obtaining his own camera started taking photographs around Sydney in a Pictorial style stressing atmosphere and also nostalgia for the old Sydney world of the Rocks and local manual workers and residents. A parallel focus on Old Sydney was a feature of print makers at the turn of the century. His first one man show in 1909 included many harbour side city images often in soft focus taken early morning and after work on his way home to North Sydney and on weekend ferry excursions ot Watsons Bay and Mosman etc.. From his arrival in Sydney Cazneaux was struck by the contrasts of old and new in the ‘big smoke’ of Sydney especially the harbourside shipping but treated these as atmospheric romantic images in a style well established by late Victorian era printmakers and painters. He was commissioned to photograph BHP plants in NSW and South Australian for the Company’s 1935 Jubilee. The industrial images combined both pictorialist atmosphere with the drama and scale of modernist celebrations of the machine age. From as early as 1915 with his art -deco striped child study The Bamboo Blind, Cazneaux developed a hybrid Pictorialist –Modernist style incorporating clearer geometric lines and brighter sunshine. In his work for The Home magazine Cazneaux most often worked in a sun-lit style although still exhibiting more impressionistic works in the Pictorialist Salons. In the late 1920s and1930s his modern style was the equal of his younger contemporaries like Max Dupain but always retained a human interest element and perspective even rather than the colder machine age aesthetic and distorting angles favoured by modernists. See http://www.photo-web.com.au/ShadesofLight/11-pictorial.htm From Gael NewtonSignificanceThis photograph represents the pictorialist concerns and style of Harold Cazneaux, a leading Australian photographer of the early twentieth century and his interest in depicting the details, surprises and constants of Harbour life, here two rowers pass ships of the Royal Australian Navy at Garden Island awaiting demolition.