(Installation View, pp. 151–156)
In 1967, the Australian government invested $3 million to participate in Montreal’s Expo 67, the International and Universal Exposition.1 In keeping with the Expo theme, ‘Man and His World’, the exhibition was committed to presenting Australians as a modern people living in an exotic land undergoing technological modernisation. Outside the Australian Pavilion visitors could see living kangaroos and wallabies amongst gumtrees. Inside, thanks to exhibition designer Robin Boyd, they could relax in ‘sound chairs’ designed by Grant and Mary Featherston and listen to stories about Australia’s ‘way of life’ recited by Robert Menzies and Rolf Harris from the chair’s inbuilt speakers. Models of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme, the Parkes Telescope and Canberra were also on display, together with example of new decimal banknotes designed by Gordon Andrews, modern Australian abstract painting selected by the director of the Art Gallery of South Australia and Aboriginal bark paintings.
Visitors entered the elevated pavilion via a Guggenheim-like central spiral ramp that circled an abstract ‘aluminium tree’, appearing out of a small circular garden, with trumpet shaped branches each ‘sprouting’ a large illuminated colour transparency.2 The transparencies had been enlarged at a lab in Sydney from 35 millimetre colour slides shot by the American photographer Robert Goodman. Goodman had first come to Australia in 1962 on assignment from National Geographic. Recognising the potential interest in Australia from overseas, he had returned to raise money from Australian mining and tourist businesses for a lush coffee table book. With their $150,000 investment, he travelled throughout Australia in 1963 and 1964. Designed by Harry Williamson, the book The Australians was published in 1966 with a text by the novelist George Johnston and became an enormous popular success. It presented a flattering portrait of national identity and cemented many of the now clichéd, National Geographic-style images of modern Australian life, notably the apparently easy-going lifestyle of its sunburnt white settlers.3
Goodman had shot 35 millimetre Kodachrome colour slides when most other Australian photographers were still shooting black and white negative film. His photographs were perfect for the occasion of the Montreal Expo, taken by an outsider with the skills of a marketer, alert to the exotic quirks of Australian life. When enlarged into backlit transparencies for the Expo, the rich colours of the outback and the ocean integrated well with the organic tree forms supporting the roof and Robin Boyd’s warm interior designs, featuring woollen carpets, wood laminates and moulded aluminium. As commentators have observed, the pavilion’s look and feel combined that of a ‘corporate foyer, hotel lobby and luxury home’.4 Just as the ‘talking’ chairs were designed to evoke the ease of Australian life, Goodman’s photographs were presented as a passing spectacle to be experienced in motion as viewers strolled up the spiral ramp.
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Carolyn Barnes and Simon Jackson, ‘A Significant Mirror of Progress: Modernist Design and Australian participation at Expo 67 and Expo 70’, in Kate Darian Smith et al (eds.), Seize the Day: Exhibitions, Australia and the World, Monash University Press, Melbourne, 2008. Online at: http://books.publishing.monash.edu/apps/bookworm/view/SEIZE+THE+DAY/123/xhtml/chapter20.html. Accessed 22 October 2019. ↩
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Ann Stephen and Philip Goad, ‘Good Evening America’, in Ann Stephen et al (eds). Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2008, p. 183. ↩
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Martyn Jolly, ‘Exposing the Australians: Australiana Photobooks of the 1960s’, History of Photography, vol. 38, no. 3, 2014, pp. 276–95. ↩
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Barnes and Jackson, ‘A Significant Mirror of Progress’, 2008. ↩