Click here for a further selection from Suburban Baroque

My first artist's book, Suburban Baroque, is scheduled for release in July 2019.

With your help Suburban Baroque will be a hardback, 25 x 25cm, 200 pages with 100 colour images, in an edition of 500 copies.

I've been documenting the inner-north of Melbourne since 1975, largely in black-and-white photography. This practice has now evolved over more than four decades.

I established The Northcote Hysterical Society page on Facebook in 2008 to share my photos and observations. This group has grown to almost 4000 members, and now serves as an alternative news and social history page (with a touch of humour) for the people of Northcote and environs.

Over the last 12 months I've been documenting the vanishing mid-century suburban interiors of Northcote, Brunswick, Reservoir, Coburg and other formerly working-class northern areas that were the destination of choice for the post-war immigrants from Europe. The once-ubiquitous terrazzo, balustrades, marble columns and lions and other manifestations of pride and nostalgia for their homelands have become increasingly rare as the years pass, generations change, and gentrification takes place.

I have previously been content to photograph the exterior of houses – my collection contains 1500 in Northcote alone. Intact interiors are much more rare – and increasingly so.

Even more than the exteriors, the rooms are redolent of a different era and imbued with pathos, as most are the pride and joy of a generation that is passing. The decor speaks of post-war immigration in a fascinating time capsule, where one experiences a mix of local – the proverbial Franco Cozzo furniture – and imported, defying current “minimalist” design conventions. Often the owners proudly designed the rooms to suit their preferences and to impress their friends and neighbours back in the 1970s, and they have immaculately maintained them that way ever since.

The rooms are the private domestic spaces of a generation that contributed much to the post-war wave of multiculturalism that changed Melbourne for the better. To my knowledge this inner-Melbourne Mediterranean fusion is stylistically unique to Australia, but I’ll need further research to substantiate this.

Although these interiors are a rich part of Melbourne’s cultural and social heritage, they remain little appreciated and largely undocumented.

Suburban Baroque aims to address that. One can’t foresee any circumstance where prime examples of these interiors will be preserved for posterity – changing taste, practical considerations and market forces will see to that. Consequently, this photographic collection will form the principal record, proving invaluable to later generations.

Suburban Baroque will be published by M.33. 

You will find a further assortment of the interiors on my Instagram feed @davidwadelton

Based in Melbourne and working collaboratively with artists and designers, M.33 specializes in contemporary photographic publishing with a focus on excellent design in the service of strong and thoughtful content.

M.33 have published some of Australia’s most interesting photographers including Jane Burton, Cherine Fahd, Yanni Florence, Darren Sylvester, Konrad Winkler, Peter Milne, Drew Pettifer and Janina Green.

Prominent artist and academic Patrick Pound will contribute an essay. The design is by award-winning designer Yanni Florence.

This project has been partly supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria. Thank you!

This initial funding has got the ball rolling, but there's a catch - from the time of my grant application many months ago to now the scale and ambition of Suburban Baroque has grown as I've continued to add new work.  The Creative Victoria grant of $6000 (although generous) now falls short of the total required to produce what's evolved into a 200-page full colour hardback.

This is a chance to do my first book - and to do it properly.

Here are the figures;

$1000 writer's fee.

$ 8786 printing for 500 copies.

$1500 freight and delivery.

$11,286 SUBTOTAL

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$6000 Creative Victoria grant

$5286 TOTAL