Beleura photo purchase on pointe

Beleura House in Mornington is among several institutions that have rescued precious photographs from the ill-fated Fairfax photo archive.

Beleura, through its Tallis Foundation, bought 18,000 Fairfax photos last year: 8000 dance photos mainly of the Australian Ballet, and 10,000 of operas, dramas and musicals. Many are of performances in Melbourne and Sydney staged by J.C. Williamson, the famous Australian theatrical management company whose boss Sir George Tallis bought Beleura, built in 1863, in 1916 as a holiday retreat. His son John, a composer, inherited the property in 1950 and left it to the people of Victoria when he died in 1996.

The ballet photos are being catalogued, mounted and inserted into protection sleeves and will be displayed at Beleura at some stage. The ballet and the performing arts collections were part of eight million photos sent to a photo archive company in the US in 2013. As Fairfax Media struggled to stay afloat, it seemed like a good idea to send the collection off to be digitised and remove the costs of physical storage. The US operator would keep the originals and Fairfax would get a searchable digital archive in return.

Two years later the digitising was only half done and some images were showing up for sale on eBay before the job had been completed. Then the FBI raided the US operator after sports memorabilia it sold turned out to be copies. The operator went into receivership facing lawsuits of more than $US100 million and the Fairfax photos were locked away by authorities. In 2017 the receiver sold about two million images – by now called the Sydney Morning Herald archive – to a Los Angeles art dealer. He and others have been part of a concerted effort to return the photos to Australia and New Zealand – at a price, of course.

Items are now in 70 institutions around Australia, including Beleura, National Library, Museum of Australian Democracy, Art Gallery of NSW and Australian War Memorial. The Age newspaper in Melbourne managed to retrieve most of its archive. Some of the ballet photos will be displayed at an Australian Ballet Society fundraiser next year.

Beleura House’s latest big event, the Just Visiting exhibition, opened last week and is in the house’s main rooms and nearby Tallis Pavilion until November 23, when the pavilion will be needed for the annual Christmas pantomime Bon Bon concert on December 8-10. The exhibition will reopen after the Christmas break and run from mid-January to late February. Featuring vintage frocks on mannequins, it imagines how guests at Beleura dressed for social occasions during the Edwardian era and from the 1920s to 1980s, so-called Bayside style, with fashions from Brighton Historical Society’s collection.

Beleura curator Ingrid Hoffmann said fashion was now a popular staple of displays at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery Australia as well as state galleries. “George and Lady Tallis loved hosting guests at Beleura, their friends as well as luminaries from J.C. Williamson productions, and John Tallis kept the tradition going when he entertained his musical coterie,” she said.

A highlight of Just Visiting will be a soundscape created by Patrick Cronin playing in the pavilion. “It will evoke Beleura’s social whirl with popular music and jazz of consecutive eras, oral history recordings, newsreel recreations from social pages, J.C. Williamson show tunes, 20th century chamber music favoured by John Tallis from the 1940s to the 1970s, and exotic music to which people would have danced and partied,” Ingrid said. Items on display will include Sir George Tallis’s gramophone and assorted vintage curiosities from Beleura’s existing collection.

• Beleura House and Garden has a music recital centre that hosts a wide variety of performances throughout the year. Phone 5975 2027 or visit www.beleura.org.au for information about house and garden tours and more.