Australian photographer Max Dupain, took this ordinary life photo of a young family walking together in Brisbane, not long after the end of WW2. This location ‘Anzac Square’, named after the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who had fought bravely in WW1. Brisbane was an important city during the war, General George Macarthur commanded the Allied forces in the SouthWest Pacific from the eighth floor of a nearby office building from 1942-1944.
The serviceman would have just hopped off a troop train stopping at Central Station nearby, possibly seeing his wife and daughter for the first time in years. A happy family reunion, most likely, and the prospect of a great future ahead of them in a golden era of growth and prosperity for Brisbane and the nation, a veritiable ‘Pax Australiana’ which in my estimation started at the end of WW2 and continued until the turn of the century.
In the photo we can see a small child walking behind her parents holding her doll, the toy is basic and much loved; as with rationing and hardship during the war there are few luxuries in any category, the parents are walking in front of her, likely on their way to catch a tram or bus to their new service man’s house in a nearby suburb. It’s a simple family moment, captured in time. More than eighty years later, here we are looking at them. The young child would be an elderly person if fortunate to have lived into old age. Everybody who helped Macarthur defeat the Japanese in the Pacific at his command centre, from the 8th floor of the office building would no longer be alive.
The photo makes me reflect on the nature and passage of time, which is both ephemeral and temporary. An ordinary family moment seperated by 80 years.
The best approach to the passage of time is to catch yourself during a good moment and think: How good is this?
Time is brief. Childhood is over in the blink of an eye. Its very true and something I didn’t understand until I experienced it personally. Much of life is like that.. Simple to understand conceptually but until you suffer the cuts and bruises of real experience, something you don’t ever fully understand on a visceral level, perhaps not even then.
Inspired by my 2021 note, “Family Time Flies”, and the Max Dupain photograph saved with it.
Photograph: Max Dupain / State Library of New South Wales.