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Got away!
The National Library in Canberra is making a refreshing splash this summer with its exhibition Follow The Sun: Australian Travel Posters 1930s-1950s.
Compiled from collections held in the National Library, National Gallery and National Archives, this sunny exhibition features 80 travel posters-starring Australia.
Australia as the dream holiday destination of a lifetime; Australia as a modern, vital and exciting place in which to live; Australia as the golden land of opportunity.
Produced for the domestic and international markets, the colourful posters sold our own country to us and also placed beguiling images of Australia before a worldwide audience.
National Library Exhibition Director, Nat Williams, saw the travel posters as an opportunity to tell the story of how Australia imagined and marketed itself for itself and the world. He says, 'I was shown these posters in our Pictorial Collection and immediately saw their widespread appeal. These beautiful images are so redolent of Australian history and tap into the public's nostalgia for the past and for when more leisurely travel was an option.'
Published during the Great Depression and in the period following World War II, the posters reach out from era of suffering and hardship to visualise a better world. They came from a time when we cherished the myth of ourselves as a rural nation characterised by mateship and egalitarian values.
The travel posters were sophisticated tools in the advertising industry's new approach to marketing in the pre-television era. And like their predecessors-the World War I recruitment posters-the travel posters were designed to stir Australians to action and to bestow feelings of national pride.
Follow The Sun includes the work of some of Australia's most celebrated artists and designers including William Dobell, Douglas Annand, Percy Trompf, Eileen Mayo and Gert Sellheim. Some of the posters are in the tradition of fine landscape painting and some use pictorial styles that would have been regarded as radically modern. Palettes of bright colours and images drawn in bold and simple lines captivated the energy and fresh experiences awaiting the traveller.
The posters do more, however, than advertise desirable destinations and travel companies, they also give interesting insights into the nature of Australian society and the prevailing values of the times. Because they are art and social history and were often published by governments, they cross the collecting ambitions and responsibilities of the three organisations represented in the exhibition.
The exhibition closes on the last day of summer. Till then it's on show everyday at the National Library of Australia Gallery in Canberra. Sun lovers who can't bear to go indoors during daylight hours can still use the exhibition to plan their next holiday; the Gallery is open until 9.00pm every night from Monday - Thursday.
Coming next at the Library
This exhibition is testament to the fact that the National Library's collections are extraordinarily diverse and rich and lend themselves to a myriad of interpretations. From travel posters one month to colonial art the next, the Library's exhibition program over the next two years will see a very wide range of themes and collection areas explored culminating in the special 2001 events under development for the Library's centenary.