September. October 27Swing time
Miniskirts, beehives and boaters made for a
memorable image that captures the spirit of an era.
OUR HISTORY
T
HE SWINGING SIXTIES came a little late to
Sydney, remembers David Mist.
“It was much more conservative here,”
says the British-born photographer, who moved to
the harbour city in 1961. “It all came a good deal
later than in London.”
But by the time he took this photo in the late
1960s, the great cultural upheaval had begun.
And who better to document Australia’s own
liberating ‘youthquake’ than a hip snapper from the
Capital of Cool, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar
and Tatler magazines, and played with David Bailey
and Jean Shrimpton? David re-created the scene
in Sydney, joining the Le Guay and Nisbett
photography studio and renaming it Studio Ten,
after his former London base, Studio Five. And he
enjoyed the burgeoning nightlife, too: “The Cross
[Kings Cross] was vibrant – you could go out
dancing in clubs and bars, and the personalities of
the city... It was fun in its day.”
The era-defining quality of David’s work was soon
recognised, and the Museum of Applied Arts and
Sciences now holds two collections of his prints,
negatives and transparencies, along with the cameras he
used, newspaper clippings and correspondence. In 1968
David was commissioned to create Sydney: A Book of
Photographs, which features this photo of Milsons Point
train station at the northern end of Sydney Harbour
Bridge. “There’d been this iconic image Laurie Le
Guay had taken many years before called The Queue,
and it was of a bus queue, all the personalities in it,”
explains David. “And I was in a car on the Bradfield
Highway, and I stopped – you could do that then – and
saw those people standing on the platform. I thought
they were quite unusual and took the image. It captured
a little bit of the time.”
HANNAH JAMESPhotograph by David Mist. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts
and Sciences. Gift of David Mist under the Australian
Government Taxation Incentives for the Arts Scheme, 1996.snapshot