Larissa Behrendt:

Hello everyone and welcome to the National Library of Australia as we launch 'Fit to Print: Defining moments from the Fairfax photo archive.' Curated by award-winning photographer, Mike Bowers. My name is Larissa Behrendt and I am the Chair of the National Library's Council. A special welcome to the Prime Minister of Australia, the Honourable Anthony Albanese. We're delighted to have you here.

I also welcome my close working colleague and friend, Alison Dellit, who's the Director-General of the National Library of Australia. At the National Library of Australia, we acknowledge First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and pay respect to elders past and present, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. At this place that holds the national story, we give thanks for the grace with which they share knowledge and Country. There are First Nation stories held here at the Library, stories that blanket the continent and that sweep back into deep time.

One of the reasons I'm so passionate about the National Library and so proud to be its Chair, is that whenever I walk into this building, I know that so many different parts of my own story are held here. There are my personal papers, the oral histories of the Stolen Generations, the newsletters of the Women's Royal Australian Navy of which my mother was apart, and through Trove, threads of my Eualayai language and culture that connect me to my own heritage.

I walk into this building and feel that my stories are here. And that is what I hope every Australian can experience when they come to the National Library. A sense that their stories, their families and their communities are part of the rich tapestry of our national history. Because this is one of the important ways that our cultural institutions contribute to a greater sense of community. They provide spaces where we can see ourselves reflected, where we can discover the experiences of others and where we can recognise that despite our different histories and perspectives, we are all part of a shared Australian story.

The Library's book, 'Fit to Print', covers only a selected history of the period 1890 to 1948, but some First Nations stories are documented here too, in the form of pictures of Yorta Yorta footballer and activist Sir Douglas Nicholls and Dharawal composer and vocalist Tom Foster, who were both participants in the 1938 Day of Mourning and the 1939 Cummeragunja Walk-Off. When the Library spoke with Tom's great-granddaughter, Shannon, about including Tom's photo in this new edition, she said, 'It means the world to us to see Tom being celebrated so many years after his incredible life and work took place.' Comments like this speak to the enduring impact of the Library's collection, along with the remarkable photography included in this book.

Fairfax Media's generous 2012 donation of 18,000 glass plate negatives to the Library has preserved an important slice of photojournalism history. With support from the Australian Government's National Cultural Heritage Account, the Library undertook restoration work of these fragile plates and the entire collection has now been catalogued and digitised, and is available to view via Trove. The Library first celebrated this remarkable archive in an exhibition last year, which attracted more than 30,000 visitors to our galleries.

The companion publication, which we are launching tonight is the director's cut. This is Mike Bowers' long list, which takes readers across rural and urban Australia into industry, celebrities, daily life, sports, remarkable events, and much more. Now it is my great pleasure to introduce the Prime Minister of Australia, the Honourable Anthony Albanese. Prime Minister, I want to begin by acknowledging your leadership through what has been an extraordinarily difficult week for our country, following the shocking attack on Helen Haines.

Your words have reminded us of the importance of decency, compassion, and respect in our public life and of the values that must continue to underpin our democracy. Our thoughts remain with Helen and her family. And I want to also acknowledge your government's significant commitment to Australia's arts and creative industries through the National Cultural Policy, Revive. It recognises that arts and culture are central to who we are, how we understand ourselves and how we connect with each other. And Prime Minister, while we may not share your unwavering devotion to the South Sydney Rabbitos, we can certainly admire your loyalty and your willingness to back the things that you believe in. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese.

Anthony Albanese:

Well, thanks so much, Larissa, and thank you for that generous welcome and introduction. I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we're meeting this evening and pay my respect to elders past, present and emerging. I also want to acknowledge Alison Dellit, the Director-General of the National Library. It is an absolute pleasure to be here to launch 'Fit to Print.' A project that amounts to a collaboration between two national treasures.

One is this very place, the National Library of Australia. One of the great institutions to which our capital is so proudly home. One of the things I'm proud of is the investment that we've made and support we have for our national institutions. Whether it be the National Gallery, the National Library, our national institutions, including Questacon, what we have done with the Australian War Memorial. It is important that the national capital have institutions that reflect how great our country is.

And the National Library here is an important centrepiece of that collection located as it is around the lake, which for visitors, whether they be domestic or international, is a shining example. The National Library, of course, provides us with a memory of our nation, holding and protecting our stories and history for current and future generations through digital platforms, including the mighty gem that is Trove. It connects communities with their national collections no matter where they live.

Ultimately, it builds our understanding of who we are as a nation and it is only when we had that understanding that we can truly understand how we've got to where we are now. Which is precondition for then determining a direction about the future. That is why the National Library is worth nurturing and is worth celebrating, which brings me to the second national treasure, Mike Bowers.

Mike Bowers is someone who, discounting Amy Remeikis' shoutouts, who's clearly pitching for more slots on a Sunday morning on 'Talking Pictures.' The fact is that Mike Bowers is one of those people you could drop anywhere in Australia and I've seen him in most parts of Australia, and people will know who he is. And unlike many Australians, of course, all politicians are loved, people will like him and will warm to him, and want to be pleased to see him. Now, even the time that Mike dropped his trousers outside a Parliament House window in the name of art, the person on the other side of that window who was the Attorney General, George Brandis, didn't charge him, but was happy to see him.

And that is the effect that Mike's aura has, a boyish glee and a big heart underpinned by the talent, integrity and professionalism that define each of Mike's many roles that he plays, photographer, curator, recontour, preserver of our history. And of course, we all look forward to 'Talking Pictures' as a highlight of the 'Insiders' programme. Last year when Jodie and I were getting married, I asked Mike to be the photographer. He kept it tight for obvious reasons. It was something that we wanted to be discreet and between us. And the work that he did on that day was just amazing. And he made that day really special for Jodie and I, and I will be forever grateful for Mike spending that very special day with us, which is almost a year ago. Whenever you look at a Mike Bowers photograph, you actually see his character as well.

You actually see his care and compassion for people somehow come through his artistry. It's not just 'piccy' going through the motions. It's something that has thought. You see light and shadow and every nuance of the relationship of people in the photos. You see moods that no matter how subtly expressed never escape Mike's eye as well. A Mike Bowers photograph doesn't just illustrate a story, it tells a story. And it is that remarkable combination of skills, sensibilities and utter devotion to telling our stories that make Mike a devout chronicler of the life of our nation, and the perfect curator of the book along with the 2025 exhibition from which it sprang.

Also called 'Fit to Print', the exhibition emerged from Mike's painstaking journey through the Library's Fairfax photo archive. An extraordinary, as Larissa has said, 18,000 negatives and I also acknowledge the contribution of Fairfax, and making that decision to house it in the Library here. Stretching from 1890, just two years after the colonies had marked the centenary to 1948, which is the year that we created Australian citizenship, importantly, and Ben Chifley ushered the first holding off the production line.

What it all adds up to is a profound mix of beauty and power and poignancy, the story of a country through good times and hard times, striving through its growing pains to seize the better future that modern Australia represents. A modern nation built amid a mosaic of ancient ones, a nation that emerges as a compelling work in progress, which we are. All captured in this tremendous labour of love that arrives in our hands, in the shape of a book. It gives me great pleasure to declare 'Fit to Print' launched. And with that, I'd like to invite Mike to the stage with Michaela. Let the interrogation begin.

Mike Bowers:

Just before you go, Prime Minister, this was a love letter basically that I wrote to our pioneers and the people who invented the... And they achieved this with incredibly bulky equipment, cumbersome equipment, slow emulsions, terrible shutters and they accomplished it with 3 to 4 exposures. It's something I thought you might like to bring back. The photographers get 3 or 4 exposures and out of there.

Anthony Albanese:

I'd rather like to bring back the loss of digital photography, which means you have to stay smiling for a lot longer.

Mike Bowers:

Thanks very much, mate.

Michaela Kalowski:

Thank you, Prime Minister. Good evening, everyone. My name is Michaela Kalowski. I'm an interviewer and moderator, and I'm thrilled to be here with you all tonight and to be in conversation with Mike Bowers. Mike, as we heard, the exhibition, people had a chat. 30,000 people were able to enjoy this exhibition last year, but I wonder if we could start by talking about what your vision was for this book.

Mike Bowers:

Well, I was always very impressed by the great publisher of 'The Washington Post', Katharine Graham, who used to quote her ex-husband, Phil, who was the publisher before he died. And she used to say that the news was the first rough draught of history. And I think that good photojournalism, which this is, are the receipts for that draught. And what I wanted to do was take those receipts and show them to the world because the power of a glass plate negative is not released until it's exhibited, as it was upstairs here and put in a book as it is here.

And suddenly the power of those images taken so long ago was suddenly released because they've been sitting in sleeves in warehouses and now, thank goodness, at the National Library. And I first came across these glass plates back in my Fairfax days when I was Picture Editor at the 'Sydney Morning Herald', and they were stored in a warehouse in Alexandria underneath sprinklers. And I always used to greatly fear that one day the entire collection could be turned into a gooey mess with just a sprinkler malfunction.

Michaela Kalowski:

So it's a genuine miracle that we're here really.

Mike Bowers:

And they're in cold storage now and they've been conserved and thank goodness for that. It's the right place for them.

Michaela Kalowski:

Let's talk a little bit about some of the early days of photojournalism, and then we will look at some photos from the actual book as well, in the exhibition. We are going to speak about how photojournalism sort of got going. But I wanted to ask you first what its inception was, what was going on before it? What did it spring out of?

Mike Bowers:

So photography has been around since about 1839 when the daguerreotype, and a camera arrived here in Australia only a couple of years after the actual daguerreotype process was invented over in Europe. And from there, they went to a wet plate process where you'd have to take a dark room out with you on the back of a horse and coat the wet plates.

Michaela Kalowski:

Sounds easy. Yeah.

Mike Bowers:

Expose them and process them in your dark room. And then they moved to dry plates around the 1860s and 70s. And they used to use photographs to carve wood blocks for newspapers because the halftone reproduction process wasn't yet invented or it was, but it was very cumbersome. So newspapers started to run a few pictures, but mostly they were woodblock engravings taking from pictures.

And the big studios of the day, like Kerry & Company had photographers working for them that they would assign to go out and then the newspapers would do a wood block engraving from that. And that's the illustration that it would appear in the newspapers. When they started to refine the half plate process and they could get to the point where they could achieve pictures in the paper every day, it was 1908 before the first photo ran in the 'Sydney Morning Herald', and it was Teddy Roosevelt's great white fleet visiting Sydney.

It was a big deal. 600,000 people turned out on the shores of Sydney Harbour to watch the fleet arrive. And they mustn't have had too much faith in the process because they did a wood block engraving on the page before and then you turn it over, and there's the first photograph that ever run. And so rapidly after that, they decided, well, ok, these things actually make a difference. They sell newspapers. So they started to poach the photographers from the big studios. And as you can imagine, studio photography is a very different thing to photojournalism. It didn't come fully developed. Photojournalism wasn't something they said, right, now you're photojournalist.

Michaela Kalowski:

So what kind of work, when you say they were studio photographers, what was the ethos they went with? What was the style of the photographs they were taking?

Mike Bowers:

Well, most of their work would've been taking portraits of people within the studio. And they would have braces and things because the emulsions were so slow they needed to hold the head still and things like that. So taking this sort of thing out into the big world was a really different thing. And you can see it in the early stuff. It's very stilted and it's not the natural sort of photojournalism as we'd recognise it today.

Michaela Kalowski:

You said to me it looks almost staged.

Mike Bowers:

It's staged. It's completely staged and we'll see some of those. Just before we go much further, I wanted to...Helen is a mate of mine. I've spent a lot of time with her over the past few election campaigns and I just wanted to mark this, and it feels a bit sort of silly launching a book. But I know that she would say, 'Well, Mike, life has to go on.' So I just wanted to mark the occasion and we hope she gets -

Michaela Kalowski:

It's a beautiful photo of her.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. This was down on...She's got her own private billabong, would you believe? And she said to me, I was photographing her and she goes, 'No, this is not me.' So she went inside and she put her apron on and she goes, 'This is me,' and that's Helen. She's just the model of what a local member should be and our best wishes are the Phil and the family. So the studios were the source of all the photographers that came into newspapers and they were being poached rapidly as newspapers ramped up their photo departments.

And this guy is a guy called George Bell, and he was the first photographer to be employed by the 'Sydney Mail' and the 'Sydney Morning Herald.' 'Sydney Morning Herald' had a weekly publication that he used to send into the rural areas. It was full of advertising of harvesters and all things used on farms, and it was a selection of the news, pulled from the daily papers of the 'Sydney Morning Herald.'

And because it was a weekly, they ran pictures before 'The Herald' did. And so George was pulled on in 1898 as the first photographer for the 'Sydney Morning Herald.' And a photograph of him has sat up at every single dark room that the 'Sydney Morning Herald' has had, and then later the room where you sat and digitised stuff. And it was a crop version of it.

And I always used to marvel at the fact that he had this huge cumbersome twin lens camera and wondered how he carried his glass plates, and he would've needed a tripod and all the rest of it. And it wasn't until I got to the Library and I saw the full frame. And if you go to the left-hand side there, you can see the horse pulling a cart. So he obviously had a service cart to help him with all the gear.

Michaela Kalowski:

But how heavy would that equipment have been?

Mike Bowers:

Hugely heavy. That camera would be, I reckon, 10 to 12 kilos.

Michaela Kalowski:

Wow.

Mike Bowers:

It's made of wood and it's quite substantial. And the glass plates themselves are quite heavy too. And there's 18,006 of them, by the way. I looked at every one.

Michaela Kalowski:

So the Prime Minister said before, when we look at photos of yours, we know that they're Mike Bower's photos. And in this book, we learn about Fishwick and we'll talk about him later because he took some very famous photos of the first photos of the cricket. And you've mentioned George Bell, but a lot of the other photographs in this collection, in this book, are by unknown photographers. Why were they not named yet?

Mike Bowers:

Well, bylines weren't a thing until the mid 70s, and one of my mentors, Rick Stevens at 'The Herald' fought for photographic bylines. And they weren't really a thing that you got every day and your work wasn't recognised. So we don't know who took a lot of these because they never wrote on the negs and they never captioned them properly, and that's why so many of them. But I think I can recognise George's work. George was a surveyor before he was a photographer and he used to love getting out into the bush.

A lot of the bush stuff is his, and I think I can recognise it. He liked shooting, he liked harvesting the light, late and early in the morning, and I think I can recognise a George Bell picture having looked at so many of them, but you'll never know. The only person we do know that you'll see in the book is credited a lot is a guy called Herbert Henry Fishwick, who we'll talk about a little later.

He was a cricket specialist. And he used to sign his glass plates with HHF.

Michaela Kalowski:

He could recognise them.

Mike Bowers:

He did because we can then know we have an attribution because it's an important thing now for us to get our names on them.

Michaela Kalowski:

And as you say also in the book, to see who was looking at what, who was recording which parts of Australia. This book is full of tiny small moments. There are some big historical moments that you'll see as well, but it's the everyday moments that sort of remind us and tell us who we were and who we are. You mentioned before that 1908, the Great White Fleet, Teddy Roosevelt's coming here, more than half a million people lining the Sydney Harbour. What were the other events that really kicked off photojournalism as we know it today? What were the things that sort of gave these photographers a chance?

Mike Bowers:

Flights sort of arrived around 1909, 1910. There were planes that came out and visited and gave demonstrations. And because of the possibilities of it crushing the tyranny of distance that we suffered here, we were absolutely transfixed by flight. And as time went on, the arrival of Kingsford Smith with the first flight across the Pacific and Amy Johnson flying out here solo from England. And they spent an inordinate amount of time out at aerodromes. And before that, race courses, they used to take off at Ascot Racecourse, which is on the side of the current Mascot in Sydney. So the Qantas domestic terminal used to be a racecourse where the first flights came in and out of.

Michaela Kalowski:

It's got that feeling, definitely.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah.

Michaela Kalowski:

And we'll see some of those photos as well. They're amazing. I want to ask you one more sort of technical question and then let's get into the photos themselves. I want to ask you, just walk us through the glass plate technology itself. How did it work? How many plates could you take in a day?

Mike Bowers:

I never though I'd hear this come out of my mouth, but thank God for the accountants at newspapers because all the really useful information for this book came out of accountants books and because they would note how much the glass plate costs. So they used to buy the glass plates pre-coated. And you would have them in these big dark slides where you would slide them into the camera and then pull the dark slide up, expose the picture, put it back in and then put it in your bag and it would go off and be processed. And you had people to do those processes.

And in the accountants, they said that they would budget for 3 to 4 plates per job and 3 to 4 jobs per day. So they'd get 12 plates a day and they would have to go out and get the photo within 3 attempts of it. And for something like this where they're in an aircraft, this is Coogee Pier. Who knew there was a pier at Coogee? I was going to ask the Prime Minister because it's [unclear], if we could get funding to have that put back up.

Michaela Kalowski:

I love it. I had no idea there was a pier there until I saw this photo and I live in Sydney.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. It washed away in a big storm, but apparently you can still see the pylons come up every now and then.

Michaela Kalowski:

Wow. In a moment when we're looking at some of the photos, I'm going to ask you more about some of the technology, but let's keep going into the photographs. Do you want to flick into the next one?

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. So here is a guy and he's holding, that's the glass plate he's holding. So he's just flicked on the light, so he's fixed it and he's just washing the water across the top of it there. So you can see how big it is. And imagine carrying 12 of those around with the big camera that you saw on George Bell's horse, and a tripod would've been a minimum because the emulsions were so terribly slow.

The shutters were pretty ineffective too. The fastest speed on a lot of these was about 125th of a second. So there's no way you could freeze action. I found some glass plates of people leaping around the place from the early 20s and it was when the first between the lens shutter came with the unheard of five hundredths of a second. So you could actually then, for [unclear], that's a really big thing because we are just insane about sport and to have the ability to freeze action in sporting events would've been transformative for the photographers of the day.

Michaela Kalowski:

And when we get to the cricket photos, we'll talk about that amazing thing that our love for sport kind of kicked off this beginning of technology about long lenses in Australia. Can we just go back to the aerial photo for a moment? How do you take an aerial photo with a piece of equipment that heavy? Do you fall out of a plane with it? What happens?

Mike Bowers:

So it would've been a twin open cockpit. And I found an account from the 'Australasian Photographic Review' from about 1922, where they were hanging out of the back of an open biplane.

Michaela Kalowski:

Oh my God.

Mike Bowers:

And then ducking down and changing the plate, and then coming back out.

Michaela Kalowski:

It's a daredevil.

Mike Bowers:

Well, yeah. I mean, if you've got an open door on an aeroplane now, you need to be double harnessed in.

Michaela Kalowski:

Not then.

Mike Bowers:

But I mean, we've got drones now, so everyone has their own infinite tripod and the ability to sort of do this without any of the rigmarole that we used to have to go through.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yes. There's a great account in the book where a photographer says, 'Well, I was in the plane and they told me I had hang onto something, but they were just exposed wires and I wasn't supposed to grab them because then the plane would crash. So I was trying to hang onto some part of the wall.'

Mike Bowers:

That was George.

Michaela Kalowski:

That was amazing. Let's keep going.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah, ok. So there he is washing the plate. So this was from the First World War and it's quite obviously a propaganda. It was titled was Off to the War and it ran on the front page of the 'Sydney Mail' in 1915. And the caption was something like the soldier back from the front, but it's a complete propaganda setup. And you can see what I mean by the stilted appearance of it. It looks like it's set up and it looks like they all sat around to do that. And he probably even got the guy to hang out the window at the front there and make it more interesting. And that line between what was doing the government's bidding, I suppose, and photojournalism wasn't really established.

Michaela Kalowski:

I think that's what's so interesting about the images you've selected in this book, as we see that line start to shift between propaganda, as you say, or taking photos of openings to news reporting.

Mike Bowers:

And this one is exactly that. So this is De Groot at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge where...

Michaela Kalowski:

So tell us the story. Tell us the story.

Mike Bowers:

And so he was part of the new guard and all ex-soldiers and kind of right wingy type people, and didn't believe that Lang should be opening it. So got on his horse and did the opening, and the photographer has just slightly missed the focus there. You can see there's a bit of movement in it as well, but it's still such a historic picture of the event. It doesn't really matter. And it's one of the few pictures of De Groot. And you can see the crazing and cracking on the glass plate there.

So that's probably not been washed very well. They haven't got all the fix of the sodium thiosulfate out of it. And it started to lift from the glass and craze and crack. And the Library would've dealt with that before they put it into cold storage. So thank goodness for them. This is an early flight from 1912 and really quite sophisticated playing compared to some of the earlier ones that they had pictures of. And again, you can see it's at the racecourse, probably Ascot, I think.

Michaela Kalowski:

I love that the first licence holder was a dentist. Very random.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. Dentist must have paid well.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yeah.

Mike Bowers:

I can't imagine that would've been too cheap. Pilot licence number one. And so this is off to the war in 1914 and walking the guys down to Woolloomooloo Wharf where they departed and maybe some of those guys didn't come back. So this you can see is not set up. There's movement in the soldiers, so they obviously weren't standing there. So this is more pure photojournalism than the sort of setup we saw before.

Michaela Kalowski:

I love how you've got the little boy at the back who's in focus and the mum and grandma or auntie, maybe aunt. You get this real sense of...And they're staring at the camera as well. It's an incredible photo. And it's such a contrast to the other one. As you said, it was really...the other one looks like a still from a film, really.

Mike Bowers:

Absolutely. And you can imagine that there was probably sections of the photographic department that were against doing the propaganda and the ones that wanted to just record it. And you can see there's a huge difference between some of the pictures like that.

Michaela Kalowski:

It's an incredible photo.

Mike Bowers:

I even got to know the 'Southern Cross' registration, VHUSU, working on the 'Southern Cross' when it arrived.

Michaela Kalowski:

Can we come back just to the 'Southern Cross' for a moment? You said that those photographs, there are a lot of them in the book that you've selected, were really, really important. This was this incredible...was it 1928 that Charles Kingsford Smith...

Mike Bowers:

1928 when he made the...

Michaela Kalowski:

And Charles flew across the Pacific. What did these photos represent for us? You mentioned it a bit when you were speaking at the beginning.

Mike Bowers:

Well, suddenly if you can cross the Pacific, you can cross our country. Suddenly it opens possibilities for Australia, in terms of healthcare and mail and supply of essential items to the bush and shrinking those distances. Not five days to get to somewhere from your remote station. It's suddenly, if you break your leg, you can be flown places. So the fact that they'd made it across the Pacific, people could suddenly see that this huge country of ours.

Which took days and days and days to cross in a train can suddenly be shrunk down to manageable times. And I think people could see the potential in it all for us. And we were obsessed with all these firsts. I don't think there's literally anyone who arrived in a plane in this country between about 1920 and 1935 that wasn't...

Michaela Kalowski:

Photographed.

Mike Bowers:

wasn't photographed. And it's great because it leaves us such a wonderful legacy for the next generation. And isn't it great that it's in this institution where it can be accessed? It's all now online. You can have a look at any of this stuff. There's a code you can punch in that brings up all this Fairfax glass plate collection and you can have a look for yourself. I'd encourage you to do it because it's such a rich and wonderful collection of photographs. It is really a marvellous resource.

Michaela Kalowski:

When you were speaking before about the idea that these photos start to tell us who were we and who are we, the idea not only of this amazing feat of being able to fly planes, as you say, across the country, but the beginning of an idea that Australia wasn't so isolated from everywhere else.

Mike Bowers:

Absolutely. You were connected to the rest of the world and it's not 6 months to go back to the mother country on a boat that suddenly the potential can be realised. And I think that probably excited a young country. It was good news for a young country like ours.

Michaela Kalowski:

This is also a very beautiful photograph.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah, yeah. Back lit. Love a bit of back lit action. I had an editor once that wouldn't run anything that was silhouetted. What a dick. This is Mrs Jean Thompson sitting in her Bugatti 39A, is it...

Michaela Kalowski:

37A.

Mike Bowers:

37A...Down at Gerringong Beach, which was one of the first racetracks in Australia. They used to race on the hardened sand down there. And she was the mechanic for her husband who'd won a few races that day. I chased down the story from this one because the negatives came out in a pile and there was no information with them. And I just was so entranced by this particular photo of Jean. I love the fact she's got a ladder running right the way up her left leg.

Michaela Kalowski:

I love that she's a race car person wearing stockings. I mean, that's also part of it for me.

Mike Bowers:

And she was the mechanic.

Michaela Kalowski:

She's the mechanic for her husband.

Mike Bowers:

And they weren't easy engines to work on either.

Michaela Kalowski:

So when you were selecting photos, both for the exhibition and for this book, was it things that just made your heart pound?

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. I mean, look, it's a lot of my own personal stuff, but I get pulled back to earth. I was lucky to have two really wonderful people from the National Library helping me out. Guy Hansen, who's just recently retired and Allister Mills. And they would sort of push me into the...they'd go, 'Look, that's wonderful. Let's have that, but why don't we have this one?' And they had very different views. I'm a hardened old press photographer and I needed that. I needed to gentle it up a bit, I think.

And it wasn't this sort of stuff. It was just to get a better balance with it. There's a cadence through the book. Photos have a cadence. And for the exhibition particularly, I learned so much from those two guys. And the Exhibitions people here are great. The PR people here are great. The people who helped me with the book are great. I can't speak highly enough of the National Library. They're just a magnificent institution and I'm a convert.

Michaela Kalowski:

We're in the right place for that. And also you said that the way that you're describing it, you 3 were sort of like the Indiana Joneses of going through these boxes. Did you find any original bits and pieces that...

Mike Bowers:

Yeah, sometimes you would open up one of the...They'd be in these sort of grease proof paper bags that were the sleeves of the day and you'd open it up, and the original job sheet would tumble out.

Michaela Kalowski:

Wow.

Mike Bowers:

And it would just be an address and a time basically, and a person's name. And not nearly enough to hedge it out, but to flesh out the details of what the story was about. But it sometimes gave you a date so you could then refer to the newspaper and try to get the details out in that way. And I wish I had time to flesh out the details for everything, but I would have to do it full time to do that.

Michaela Kalowski:

I remember you told me, we spoke about this earlier, that you found a very...when you were looking at the accounts as well. That you found that at one point there was, obviously a horse costs money and you have to pay the photographer. Can you tell us a bit about that story?

Mike Bowers:

So the guy was paid 4 pounds a month to take photographs in rural areas, it said, and the company will supply feed and a horse and provide 5 pounds. So the horse was paid more than the photographer.

Michaela Kalowski:

I love that story. What's next for us?

Mike Bowers:

So these are two sisters who drove around Australia. So again, when roads started to open up the country, these firsts were a big thing. So who's going to be the first person around circumnavigate Australia? Who's going to be the first women to do it? All these firsts were big events for us as we sort of tried to tame the country with not only aviation, but with automobiles as they became faster and bigger and more reliable. And these were two sisters that took off in June 1931 and drove around Australia. They took 7 months, I think it was, to do it.

Michaela Kalowski:

Fantastic.

Mike Bowers:

I love this picture because it's a billy cart, in inner Sydney and the photographer has obviously gone, 'Oh, let's put the dog in and we'll just put a couple of rocks beside the rear wheel and the front wheel to stop it from rolling away.'

Michaela Kalowski:

And Mike, he totally ruined the photo for me because I had not noticed that. I was like, 'Amazing. It's an action shot.' He's like, 'Michaela, it's staged.' It's so good. I love how the little boys at the corner are almost about to give it away. It's really not going down that road.

Mike Bowers:

It would've been the whole make out like you're going fast.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yeah. Even the dog's in on the act. It's fantastic.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah, even the dog's doing it, which is great. This is where my world's collide. This is the original artist for 'Ginger Meggs', Banks, his name is, and he was the originator of the cartoon. And the cartoon is still going today and it's had 4 artists drawing for it. And the latest one is a guy called Jason Chatfield who, before he moved to The States, regularly appeared on 'Talking Pictures.' So this is where my world's collide. And you see there that the emulsion again has cracked and sort of lifted through the centre of his arm and his table there.

Michaela Kalowski:

Was there an image back there of the naval dockyard? Was that one back?

Mike Bowers:

I think that's coming.

Michaela Kalowski:

Is it coming?

Mike Bowers:

Yeah.

Michaela Kalowski:

I think that changed it.

Mike Bowers:

So one of the things I think that really helped the early photographers work out how to do photojournalism in a truly storytelling way was the bridge. It had a sort of a planning stage and a foundation stage and an early stage, and then it was finished. And they suddenly realised, I think, through this that...and it's all shot on glass. I think they didn't trust the new celluloid technology, that new fandangled thing. Let's just shoot it all on glass because we know that it'll keep and it'll be our best stuff.

And as the 20s went into the 30s, they only shot stuff they really wanted and thought was important with glass plate negatives. They started to use cellulose and nitrate negs during that period. And it was similar to when we changed over to digital because those early digital cameras were such dogs that anything important, we sort of ran back to film and what we knew to try and keep it.

There'll be a big hole in the Sydney Olympics because we were forced to use digital and those first cameras, they had shutter lag on them, so you would miss the decisive moment and they were really low res. And there'll be this sort of massive hole in our history through that period when we were using those. They rapidly got very good and overtook the resolution and quality that film could produce, but those early ones were fairly shocking. So this bridge, it was just documented in every angle and in every way possible and you start to see a photojournalistic style that you can recognise. This was after the bridge was finished. They put 96 locomotives onto it to test the weight of it. I don't know what they told the drivers.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yeah. Good luck, really, I think.

Mike Bowers:

It might hold.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yeah. It's amazing.

Mike Bowers:

And this one's really special. The day before it opened, they let all the school kids in Sydney, if they wanted to, march across it. And my mum's down in there somewhere. She told me that as a 6 year old child, she walked across the bridge the day before it opened. So I've often got a glass out and tried to find this.

Michaela Kalowski:

And as you say, there's a real beginning, middle and end there, isn't there? From people actually constructing the bridge to testing the bridge.

Mike Bowers:

It's a story.

Michaela Kalowski:

It's a story. And it's the first time. It's these events that allowed photojournalists the opportunity to actually kind of hone that storytelling, not just illustrating.

Mike Bowers:

And they rapidly learned how to sort of use light in a way that go out early, go out late. You can see it written backwards there, the caption - prawning. So it's a prawning boat on Sydney Harbour, but there's a mist still there and it's obviously very early, I think. And the light's coming through and they're silhouetted. I mean, it's just an artwork, I think.

Michaela Kalowski:

It looks like a turner, doesn't it?

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. So this is one of the unique things about Australian photojournalism, that cricket's one of the few sports where you can't get close, you're forced not to get close to it. And the early photographers were really very frustrated because the pictures they were getting, they just blew the hell out of them because the lenses weren't very long and the resolution was terrible, and it was horrible. So in the 1920 - 21 Ashers tour, a guy called Herbert Henry Fishwick, who I mentioned before, he rode away to an optical company in London. And he said, 'I want you to make me a lens that's a metre and a bit long.' He gave them the dimensions. They made telescopes, these guys. So goodness knows what they thought, but they spent about a year's wage on this and they sent it out, and he unleashed it during the 2021 Ashes Tour.

And the photographs that he got caused a sensation amongst not only the newspapers here, but the touring English team took the pictures home. They got prints of it because they were so amazed and they took them home and the newspapers back home sent photographers back out to Australia to see how it was done. So long lens photography was born on the sidelines of the SCG, and it's something we don't celebrate enough. We don't celebrate the fact that we were first to do this.

And when you sit now at a big sporting event and you look down onto the sidelines, you'll see long lenses all over the place. And that started right at the SCG. I can't find an earlier mention anywhere in the world than Henry Herbert Fishwick and his 1.2 metre lens. And he took 2, this had to be placed on 2 tripods to hold it steady. And he had little binoculars that flipped down over his glasses so he could see the balls coming in and he would have 2 dozen plates for a day.

And so he would have to be fairly judicious. I don't know how you would tell. Nowadays when you do cricket, I did a cricket tour back in 2009 when I left Fairfax. I did the South Africans. I followed them around and did it. I photographed every ball pretty much that came down and 12 frames, goodness, I'd use 12 cards in a day because I'd have remote cameras on the roof and up on railings shooting down the wicket and things.

The fact that they managed to get really decisive moments is pretty amazing. If we fast forward a decade to the [19]32 - 33, the Bodyline series, Herbert Fishwick had refined his lens and he'd refined his techniques and he was pretty damn good at it by that stage. He was at the Adelaide Test, which was the famous test where Douglas Jardine, the captain, employed the leg theory, they called it.

And the Australian press called it bodyline and struck the captain, Woodfull across the heart basically. Fishwick took a photo of him staggering away from the crease, dropped his bat and staggered away from the crease and people are coming in around him and there was a fractured skull, and he's got a photo of that when it happened as well. There was outrage in Australia at the time and they sent letters to the governing body in England. But when the pictures were printed, they were sent to London and it actually exhibited.

I've read an account which says the pictures that Fishwick took of the body line of Woodfull being struck and the fractured skull, and all those helped to sway opinion to the point where they forced Larwood to write an apology letter. Which he never wrote and ended up out here in Australia. And that's when I was talking about the receipts for the first rough draught, Fishwick had the receipts for the bodyline and he showed them over in London, and it changed the way that cricket was played. That they made rules to try and negate leg theory. And that's a powerful legacy to have for just thinking I want to take better photos of a cricket match.

Michaela Kalowski:

It's an incredible story. There are a few more cricket photos I think coming.

Mike Bowers:

There are. So this is one of Fishwick's plates and you'll see they've marked it up where it's going to be. Yeah, that's Bradman at the crease there, I think. Yep. Scoring his sensory on the first day of the fifth Test, 1937. So that's a fair few years on. His actual 1.2 metre lens, the one we just showed, that was a bit tighter than that. So I'm not quite sure what lens he's using there, but he got very, very good at it and was always sent on the Ashes. He was sent to every place to photograph them. And this is the board in the ABC where when they were playing in England, the Ashes Tour, the results came over the telegraph and then they would write it up. And the guy would have the pencil and hit it on the table, and he could look at this was the ABC scoreboard.

Michaela Kalowski:

That's fantastic.

Mike Bowers:

So there you have Kingsford Smith arriving. You can see this huge amount of coppers that came with him because the crowd was enormous.

Michaela Kalowski:

And all the random people just standing underneath the propellers, just in case.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah.

Michaela Kalowski:

It's fantastic.

Mike Bowers:

This was victory day in 1918, and you can see up there in the top left-hand corner, HHF, it's backwards. So that's him signing his negatives. I'm really pleased he did because he's the only one that did it.

Michaela Kalowski:

There's so much to see in this photo, including the guy in the second row who has no teeth. He's missing a lot of teeth there.

Mike Bowers:

I'm pretty sure that's the Herald Building with the flags on top, the old one, in O'Connell Street.

Michaela Kalowski:

Wow.

Mike Bowers:

So he didn't walk far from the office.

Michaela Kalowski:

And the gentleman at the front is missing an arm.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah.

Michaela Kalowski:

The man at the front. Yeah.

Mike Bowers:

Oh yeah, he's too.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yeah. And you can see children far at the back. It's just an incredible photo.

Mike Bowers:

Yeah, it's beautiful. Rural stuff was a big part of what they did as a photo department going out to...And Fishwick ended up leaving the 'Sydney Morning Herald', and he specialised in taking photographs of merino studs. So he spent his sort of later years just travelling around properties and photographing their champion merinos. Who knew photography of a sheep photographer was a thing? So yeah, that's what we've got for you.

Michaela Kalowski:

That's the last one. Fantastic. We've got just a few more minutes with Mike, and then obviously he'll be signing books out front and you can chat to him then as well. I want to ask you just a couple of things. We're in this age or beyond the apex of visual culture. We've all got a phone. We take 57 photos a day. We don't even know of what.

And you're talking about people who could take 12 frames a day, and as you say, changed history, they changed long lenses, they changed the dangerous part of a sport that people were like, 'That's not cricket.' Are we looking at too many photos? Are we forgetting when we take this many photos ourselves with our own technology? Are we forgetting what it means to actually look at something and really see it?

Mike Bowers:

Look, I think we are desensitised to it because we hit with a blizzard of imagery every day, but there's a funny way that quality photographs, even of daily events where we do every day up at the Parliament, for instance, that the really quality stuff will bubble to the surface. It has a way of, I guess, bookending the blizzard of social media stuff that we hit with. And then something done by a proper professional has a quality to it that will force its way into the limelight.

I can't tell you how many times some of the really talented colleagues up at The House...when I started up there in the mid 80s, there were a dozen photographers who were employed full-time and probably half a dozen casuals that made a living out of the Press Gallery. There's now 3 full-time photographers. There's my friend Alex Ellinghausen from 'The Sydney Morning Herald', an amazingly talented bloke.

There's Mick Tsikas from AAP, who's equally a very, very talented and gifted photographer, and Lukas Coch, who's one of the top photographers in the country, and that's it. The rest, including myself, are part-timers. And I don't just think that's a bad thing for photojournalism, that's a bad thing for democracy.

There needs to be a certain amount of guys up there competing with each other, but helping each other as well to reach critical mass, where we can actually push the profession forward in a professional sense and [unclear] to appear to the ABC who have a position that they cycle the cameraman through that just takes stills every sitting period. So they've seen the value in it. I just wish they'd stopped cutting full-time photographic positions because I think if we keep going this way, the job's not going to exist.

Michaela Kalowski:

There's a lot that's been written about cognition and bias, about the idea that how we make sensitive information when we read it, how our brains digest and sort information when it's spoken to us, when we read it and when we see it. And we're living in a moment where it's difficult, becoming more and more difficult to discern whether what we're seeing is true when we look at images.

Mike Bowers:

Correct.

Michaela Kalowski:

How do we guide against that? How do you see the rise of AI in photojournalism or in journalism generally affecting our ability to use these images, as you say, as the receipts of what's actually happening?

Mike Bowers:

Yeah. When the Nepal flood images came through, the first thing I though was it has to be manufactured on a computer surely, because it was just so extraordinarily dramatic. And this is a problem for people who have to react to this stuff and start, because there were obviously there'd be Australians involved. So for people that have to react to that and start inquiries and all the rest of it, they don't want to look like fools.

So they first have to check whether the thing's real. And I think this is becoming a problem for us. And all you have to go on, I think, is your reputation as far as a photographer goes. I think if it comes from the major wire services like Reuters or AP or AAP here in Australia, I think you can pretty much rely that it's a proper image. So you need to look at the attribution underneath it, I think. And again, there have been times when those people have been fooled, even though they've got things in place to try and not be fooled. And so I think at the end of the day, the great thing I love about the glass plates is they're un-AI-able. You can't manufacture these things.

Michaela Kalowski:

Should we go back to glass plates, do you think?

Mike Bowers:

I think there might be a swing back to negatives because the...

Michaela Kalowski:

Do you like taking photos on...You talked about how crappy digital was to begin with.

Mike Bowers:

I pulled out some of my old cameras and bought some film recently because it slows you down and it makes you think about stuff a little bit more. And you're more careful because it costs a bloody fortune to have it processed and printed now. So yes. But I think there might be a swing back a little bit towards film because it's proof that the camera companies are starting to take steps.

Leica are making a digital camera that's got a provenance and it was explained to me, and I can't tell you how it works, but it's got a little stamp embedded in the image. And as soon as you manipulate that image in any way, the stamp disappears. So it's like a provenance stamp that goes through all the layers that make up a digital image. And I think their technology may be able to solve it. But I think as soon as you get something, the AI will be looking at how do we get around manipulating an image and still have the provenance stamp in it.

So for every move that's made towards legitimacy of an image, there'll be a counter move I think in the other way. So I think we're in for a torrid time. And I think get to know the photographers in your local area and get to know who are the good ones, and read their byline would be my suggestion.

Michaela Kalowski:

This is probably my last question to you. There are moments where we look at images and they're important for us to see. They tell us a story of something, but there also is a lot of input at the moment, both on social media and also just generally photos that we see that cause us to feel either despair or rage. And you said to me before tonight that the power of really good photojournalism is that it bookends tragedies, it bookends events. Can you talk to us a bit about that? Because I thought that was a useful thing to end on.

Mike Bowers:

Well, I mean, if you look at the finalists in the Walkley Awards in the photographic sections this year, they're images that are not easy to look at. They're from the Bondi massacre last year and they're terribly confronting images. And photojournalism in its purest form, however, because it's something that needs to be seen. It was a dreadfully violent and atrocious event and the photos from it display that. And I think whilst they're not an easy thing to look at, I think they're essential for us to learn from. And one of them is actually being taken of the guy on the bridge and the guy stuck his head up and photographed this with a long lens. It's a pretty brave thing to do.

Because you realise what he's doing on that bridge and they're not easy pictures to look at. But I think that it's a terribly important thing to have trust in those images and the industry needs things like the Walkleys to celebrate not only the sort of skill of the photographer, but also the impact that that has because good photojournalism in all its forms will have a reaction from you. That's what it's meant to do. The photos in this book are supposed to elicit a reaction from you. And I guess that's the bookends of both of them. There's a horrible side to it, but there's also a..

Michaela Kalowski:

You move through something.

Mike Bowers:

You move through them. Yeah.

Michaela Kalowski:

Yeah. In a moment, I'm just going to hand over to the Director General of the National Library of Australia, Alison Dellit. But I just wanted to take a moment on behalf of, not on behalf of Mike. But to say thank God that National Library of Australia cleaned up these archives, these amazing archives, kept them, digitised them and that they are ours now to access and to celebrate. Mike Bowers, thank you so much for the exhibition and for this book, and for all your insights tonight. Please join me in thanking Mike Bowers.

Alison Dellit:

I would like to extend that thank you to Michaela for such a fantastic conversation. And in particular, I think for bringing us back at the end to the relevance that this work has for today and reminding us that photojournalism is fundamentally also about choosing what we're going to look at and how we're going to see it, and what we talk about and that as a nation that really matters now as much as it ever has. I also want to thank Mike. I want to thank Mike on behalf of the whole National Library. The 'Fit Print exhibition', the first iteration of the book and this far superior handsome version of the second version of the book that you should buy, even if you own the first one, has been a real success for us in being able to talk about Australian history and the history of photography, and the way that those two things come together.

It's reached audiences that we haven't been able to before. And I think it's enhanced a conversation again about how Australia sees itself and how that works. Mike has also, for the staff working with him, simply been a joy and a pleasure to work with. And I hope that you got a sense tonight of the shared celebration of the joy of history, of images, of exploring it. And the absolute fun of completely obsessive work in an archive. I am going to point out that looking at 18,006 images is a lot, even in our digital era.

Mike Bowers:

It's alright if you say it. There is something wrong with it.

Alison Dellit:

Looking at 18,006 glass negatives, which I did want to remind people is not quite the same as looking at a normal image borders on...

Mike Bowers:

Obsessive.

Alison Dellit:

...heroic. Let's go with heroic. And as much as you may be walking out of here with the impression that every single one of those images was a compelling image. We did cull down to the 500 that were excellent, many of which we have yet to show you. But now all good things come to an end. After the launch of Mike's first book, we received some robust feedback from members of the Press Gallery about our decision not to offer alcoholic catering.

So balancing our public service duty for probity and apparently the demands of a particular audience. Upstairs, we do have a pop-up bar where you'll be able to purchase both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. In addition, our Bookshop is open and you may purchase copies of the book which Mike will be signing. To finish, can you thank...oh, one very important thing. I was going to thank, we mentioned Guy Hansen and Allister Mills.

Guy's not able to be with us tonight and Allister's on parental leave, but I believe tonight is the first foray of young Olive to the National Library and Allister is up the back, if we would like to thank him on behalf of the exhibition, [unclear] for the work. And with that, if we can thank our speakers once again and I will see you upstairs.