Federation Photographs

The Federation celebrations on January the 1st were concentrated in Sydney where all the allocated 20,000 pounds were spent attempting to create a spectacle which would rival any held in the British Empire. Professional photographers in Sydney such as John Paine saw the potential for capitalizing on the unique event and selling their photographs to those unable to attend as well as those that had.

Taking photographs of the event posed problems for John Paine. Firstly he needed to capture the size and scope of the spectacle and to accomplish this he took photographs of the procession from a building looking down on the corner of the Sydney Post Office and George Street. These photographs attempted to show the size of the event by capturing the procession as it moved down Martin Place, also as it faded into the distance along George Street.

Paine was not the only one to think this was one of the better vistas of the procession. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted the next day, "Nowhere along the route was the procession seen to better advantage than when passing along Martin Place. ... the many windows with outlooks from the gaily decorated General Post Office were filled with the faces of employees and their friends"

Secondly Paine was well aware he would need to take photographs which would capture the events in more detail. Although the procession would take two hours to cover its five miles around the city and up Oxford Street to the Domain, Paine needed to move his equipment to a number of different locations along the route. Knowing that it would be impossible to be at all the vantage points along the route, he like many other photographers used the temporary Commonwealth Arches as the focus of his photographs.

The nine Commonwealth arches which were spread along the route had been constructed rather hastily after funding for each arch had been cut from 1500 pounds to 500 pounds. The Sydney Decoration Committee had hoped that more money would be contributed for arches from other towns and cities in Australia, but in the end Melbourne and Newcastle were the only ones outside Sydney to contribute an arch to the procession. Even the German, French, and American arches were provided by local (Sydney) citizen groups.

Time constraints meant that although Paine managed to photograph all these structures for his stock book many of them are taken after the procession has passed through. Some arches which are photographed from both sides, such as the ‘Wheat Arch", show in one shot the procession heading towards Pitt Street and in the other in a near empty street later in the day.

Paine was lucky to get the photographs he did of the events for bad weather could easily have hampered his attempts to photographing the celebration. On New Years eve a storm had swept through Sydney which had torn festoons and banners out of place, and added to this the early morning showers had left the flags hanging limply from the arches which stretched along the route. Luckily for Paine (and us) the Decorations Committee repaired the arches and the weather improved as the morning continued, the celebrations success being confirmed when the Sydney Morning Herald declared,

"Yesterday’s decorations from a spectacular point of view, was a great and glorious victory of the senses".

At the end of the week the decorations were taken down, leaving no permanent memorial of Sydney’s Federation Celebrations, and it is lucky for posterity that commercial photographers who capitalized on the events of the day have left us an invaluable record. For John Paine however the value of his days work was set, according to his stock book at the Macleay Museum, at eleven shillings per dozen and one and six for each individual photograph.