Pages from Newcastle Slideshow2014

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Slideshow enthusiasts had slides custom-made to punctuate the program. This one is by Newcastle Morning Herald cartoonist Les Lumsdon. Amateurs, he suggests, ignore advice against working with children and animals. The golden days of the home slideshow NOT so many years ago the hearty suggestion: “Let’s have a slide night” was often enough to make the whole family groan and to induce friends and relatives to suddenly discover prior pressing engagements. And yet, despite the fearsome reputation of family slideshows as the definitive cure for insomnia, hardly a family was without a slide projector and folding screen, and many amateur photographers shot more colour transparencies than negatives on their days out with their cameras. Actually, the slide fashion was an evolutionary step from the earlier era of “magic lanterns”. These box-like projectors (originally lit by candles and later by electricity) projected images from transparent glass slides. The drawback was the relative difficulty in converting negatives to positives, then sandwiching the image in two plates of glass.These drawbacks were overcome in the great democratisation of photography that followed the end of World War II. Family snapshots switched from black and white to colour and most people settled on the popular 35-millimetre roll-film format. Colour transparencies were cheaper and easier to process than negatives, and the colours were also more stable. As a result, many people preferred positive film and cardboard-mounted slides for projection to colour prints for family albums. All manner of slide projectors were made, evolving from simple, single-slide units to complicated machines with carousel magazines and remote controls. And all this was made redundant, virtually overnight, by computers and digital projectors. Nowadays, most people regard their old slide projectors as curiosities or paperweights. As for the slides, vast numbers have been thrown to landfill. In many cases a particular tragedy has struck.The marketing of basic slide and film scanners that plug directly into home computers has made it possible for people to quickly and simply digitise their slide collections. 1
Unfortunately for posterity the scans produced by these basic devices are often low-resolution and the scanners usually lack the capacity to correct for the colour-casts caused by deterioration of the transparencies over time. Many people, having scanned their slide collections, have thrown away the originals, patting themselves on the back for saving space in their wardrobes. That was what prompted the idea for a book of colour slide images of the Newcastle area. Before this massacre of images from a very particular period went too far, I thought, my wife and I should follow up our previous books of black and white photos with a volume preserving something of the heyday of the colour slide in Newcastle and the Hunter. The late Doug Brown helped us get that idea off the ground. Doug had contacted me to share his knowledge about the Mayfield area, and he invited me to scan some of his albums of snapshots from the Box Brownie camera days. Having done that, Doug next mentioned his huge collection of colour slides, and suggested these too might be worth examining. Doug had made it his business to document the visits of ships, the last days of wellknown buildings and other events in the civic life of Newcastle. After he died, his relatives generously followed through with his undertaking and allowed us to scan Doug’s colour slides, an undertaking that occupied many days. Next we met Barry Shoesmith, another compulsive photographer with an unusually good eye for composition and exposure who kindly offered his own collections to be scanned. More colour slides emerged from the vast collections of the late Ken Magor (whose black and white negatives of Newcastle set us off on our course of book publishing in 2010) and other images came from Doug Burnitt, the late Douglass Baglin, Doug Roberts and Alan Bennett (via Pete Smith). Some people might wonder whether it’s too soon for a book of photos from slides; whether too little time has elapsed since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s for images from those decades to have enough meaning or interest. We wondered that too, but seeing pictures of the demolition of Zaara Street power station, of the old escalator and elevator in the middle of Hunter Street Mall, of the Skyline Drive-in theatre at Lambton and of many other forgotten places and things persuaded us that the project was worth attempting. The Bolton Street offices of The Newcastle Herald and The Newcastle Sun, as they were in the 1970s. 2
Page 1 and 2: NEWCASTLE SLIDESHOW 1
Page 3: NEWCASTLE SLIDESHOW Selected, arran
Page 7 and 8: With a painted frame like these beg
Page 9 and 10: Another two 1980s-era aerials of Ne
Page 11 and 12: Bar Beach (above), and Newcastle Be
Page 13 and 14: Swim-suited 1961 Newcastle Beach Gi
Page 15 and 16: Views from Fort Scratchley. Above,
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