PLANTING DREAMS AUDIO GUIDE Richard Aitken on the Hallams slide collection RICHARD AITKEN: These images are taken from slides photographed by Robert Hallams, of Eastwood in suburban Sydney. Hallams was active in the 1960s and 1970s, taking thousands of slides. The SL was fortunate to acquire almost two thousand these slides in the 1990s, rescued from the dumpster. The Library can’t collect everything, but what made this collection so compelling was that Robert Hallams used relatively stable Kodachrome colour transparency film and then carefully labelled each slide with the location and date. But what distinguishes this collection is that Hallams was also attracted to images of ordinary places, the kind of places that most of us experience but never stop to document.These images are prosaic to the point of perfection, capturing the ordinary and the normal with a flair for artless composition and deathless charm. The collection evokes all the innocence and charm of an old-fashioned slide night. And perhaps even a touch of the boredom, as Uncle Neville reaches for the third or fourth carousel of slides. Here is the car park at Ryde shopping centre, there the flowerbeds at Parramatta psychiatric hospital and, coming up, a faux Georgian display house at Faulconbridge. Hardly the stuff of dreams, you might think. Not all the slides are of gardens, in fact only a small proportion of the collection depicts gardens.But as a garden historian, I’m not only fascinated by those that do, but also by those that show other sorts of designed landscapes. So while there are some rippers of ordinary suburban gardens, the ones that really do it for me are the ones that show playgrounds, car parks, showgrounds, and other places on the periphery of our garden history. Suddenly the Ryde shopping centre car park can be seen in the context of Sydney’s postwar suburban modernism, the flowerbeds at Parramatta as the last gasps of Victorian moral welfare, and the neo-colonial style of a Faulconbridge house as part of an emerging national identity. These things are easily parodied. This is the Australia of Edna Everage and Norman Gunston. Yet this collection is not a parody. These slides are the real deal, documenting gardens in their unwitting fashion for Australia’s national memory. (ENDS)