I remember encountering Euan McGillivray and Matthew Nickson as third year students when I first started at Prahran in 1974; two earnest chaps who were making use of the large format camera on rails in front of a pinboard that was the permanent copy setup in the studio. Even after graduating they would visit John Cato and technician Murray White from time to time.

It is relevant to consider their photography, which the National Gallery of Victoria’s Jennie Boddington acquired in 1975, the year after they had graduated.

These two images by McGillivray (Nickson’s print hasn’t been digitised by the NGV) reveal a consciousness of the subordination of women in 1970s Australian society. The first works hard to set up a hierarchy, with leisurely males on top, one assuming a god-like halo courtesy of overexposed daylight from the window. Downstairs, directly beneath them, and diminished in scale by a trick of perspective, is a woman hard at work preparing food in a cluttered pub kitchen.

The second picture reinforces the impressions of the first. In great haste, and with an harassed expression, a waitress dressed in white apron, stockings and heels, swings open the door of another hotel kitchen while, again, men relax in conversation.

Both pictures are from a medium-format camera, so are not mere grab-shots, but carefully planned or pre-visualised. One might contemplate the journey to this level of social consciousness from remote rural beginnings in Pyramid Hill, around a hill rising 110 metres above the surrounding flatness, where the population was 186 people when McGillivray was born there in 1951.

These two were the masterminds of WOPOP: Working Papers on Photography a publication which sprang from a 1977 conference in Sydney that they organised. Art historian Helen Ennis argues that it was during the 1970s that photographers first began to be seen as artists and deliberate efforts were made to promote this ideal against commercial applications that had dominated the previous decades.

Over September and October 1977, amidst increasing interest in recognising the medium as an art form and establishment of public photography collections, and the opening of an Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) by Margaret Whitlam in November 1974, Wayne Hooper of Sydney University convened a conference Photography in Australia. Its theme was photography as an art form and communication medium and was held in the Department of adult education at his University. Attending were 150 photographers, teachers, curators, librarians and students. Many were from interstate, paying A$35 and travel and accommodation fees (a value of A$200 in 2021) each.

From amongst the attendees Hooper set up a national committee of members interested in the history of the medium, and later, at the 1978 annual general meeting of The Australian Centre for Photography Hooper berated the Centre for its lack of initiative in supporting such conferences and, as reported by Anne-Marie Willis in the Nation Review, bemoaned the Sydney-centrism of an organisation that called itself the “Australian Centre”

In December 1977, the Sydney conference delegates joined Euan McGillivray and Matthew Nickson in proposing, and then establishing, a journal WOPOP: Working Papers on Photography. From a terrace house at 20 Wellington Street, near Richmond station in Melbourne, McGillivray and Nickson edited and irregularly published nine numbers of the staple-bound journal between 1978 and 1983.

In 1980, when McGillivray was employed as curator at the Science Museum and Nickson at the Photography Department at RMIT, they convened a follow-up Australian Photography Conference convened over September 19–21, 1980 at Prahran College where the pair had studied under Athol Shmith and John Cato.

Sculptor Clive Murray-White remembers;

“a massive event called Working Papers on Photography (WOPOP), a contemporary photography talk fest, I was there by accident because a friend had brought his entire final year photography class down from Sydney to Melbourne for the conference and they were all camping at my house – much of the debate was about whether photographers should assume the right to steal people’s characters – as in street photography. By the 2nd day the students were very depressed because they were feeling that there was nothing much left that they could take pictures of…. admittedly many had swallowed very large Robert Frank pills. I think I formed the view that photography (like any art form) can have its own PC police.”

Presentations included;

• a report by cultural historian Anne-Marie Willis on her research into nineteenth-century photography supported by the Australian Gallery Directors Council
• ‘Mods and Docos’ by Helen Grace, Charles Merewether, Toni Schofield and Terry Smith
• international papers including Allan Sekula’s ‘The Frame in Photography’ and British art historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith’s paper on German poster artist Klaus Stack, with an exhibition of Stack’s work relating to the style of John Heartfield

Other speakers were

• then Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of NSW Gael Newton
• Foundation Chairman of Standards Australiaʼs Committee on Signs and Symbols David Sless
• photography lecturer John Cato
• Macleay Museum curator Allan Davies
• and art historian Shar Jones

The not-for-profit, hand-stapled WOPOP joined contemporaries amongst ‘serious’ art journals; Art & Text, Artlink, Art Network, (the Australian) Lip, the ACP’s Photofile and Praxis. Like many of them, at the dawn of postmodernism, it adopted a Marxist perspective, proclaiming that it would “consider photography as a medium of communication as well as an art form,” with a  “focus…on the social usage of photography as on the images themselves,” by “drawing on sociology, history, literature, politics, aesthetics, anthropology and linguistics.”

Amongst its contents the journal published criticism, theory, historical and technical articles, on conservation and preservation, picture collection and communication, reported on research in progress, and listed the grants for photographic research, practice and display available from the Australia Council.

The contents of WOPOP Issue No.1 of 1978 included;

an editorial by Euan McGillivray and Matthew Nickson, and articles;
• “John Heartfield” by Matthew Nickson; “Futurology & Photography” by Graeme Johanson (Latrobe Library, State Library of Victoria);
• “LaTrobe Library Picture Collection” by Jenny Carew (acting Picture Librarian, Latrobe Library, State Library of Victoria);
• “Sontag on Photography” by Ann-Marie Willis;
• “Silver” by Matthew Nickson; “A Constitution Lost” by Ann-Marie Willis
• “Australian Women Photographers” by Jenni Mather, which was early research that she and Barbara Hall incorporated into their groundbreaking 1986 publicationAustralian women photographers : 1840-1960.

The 1970s, which our Prahran Legacy exhibition will cover, was as decade literally bookended by Australian-born social historian Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and her The Obstacle Race (1979), aligned with the feminist revolution. The latter volume detailed women artists’ struggle for the very recognition of their existence, and their battle continued.

Olive Cotton is a case in point but not mentioned in The Obstacle Race, because it was only during the 1970s that feminist researchers Hall and Mather had began to retrieve from obscurity work by unknown or neglected women photographers. Nearly half a century later, Prahran alumnus Jane Scott, whose ‘blonde’ hair colour is irrelevantly pointed out by reporter James Cunningham in the above SMH article Women barred from hotel bar, is a film producer.  It is the same Barbara Hall who protests in the newspaper article; “By not allowing us in you are guilty of discrimination. You are not running a public bar. You are running a male only establishment.”

When local content was not available WOPOP reprinted essays from international commentators including A. D. Coleman, and J.C. Sherer and, as Print Letter (later incorporated in European Photography journal) reported in 1978; “articles by John Berger and Artforum‘s Alan Sekula, with a liberal dollop of Kozloff (or, if you prefer, a dollop of liberal Kozloff) thrown in for good measure.”

Issue No.5 December 1979 is headed by McGillivray and Nickson’s editorial, and includes articles

• ‘…A Not So New Non Silver Process’ by ‘the Editors’;
• ‘China Cheesecake’;
• ‘On the Subject of John Szarkowski’ by A.D. Coleman;
• ‘Pictures, Words and History’ by Jozef Gross;
• ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of representation)’ by Allan Sekula;
• Ian Cosier ‘An Australian Photographic Data Base: A Research Resource’.

In issue 7 McGillivray reported on research into the collection of Richard Daintree negatives at the Science Museum of Victoria

Issue No.8 included Johansen’s investigation of German photographer of Australian indigenous people, J. W. Lindt.

Issue No.9 contained, amongst other articles, Nick Lottkowitz, ‘Conservation and restoration, some chemical thoughts.’

Finding suitable content for the journal required considerable and far-reaching research and the editors found it so difficult to source a continuous supply of local content that they inserted a jibe at their readership on the cover of issue 8.

That search led to new interests for the editors; on reading Carroll Hart’s ‘The New Documentation: Oral History and Photography’, Nickson, who with McGillivray was then becoming interested in the planning and execution of historical photograph preservation, wrote to the author on January 1, 1983, about her involvement in the project. In issue 9, of July 1983, Sherry Konter’s ‘Final Report’ on the Vanishing Georgia Project was printed beside the editors’ proposal for the Australian Bicentenary; ‘Australia as Australians Saw It. A Comprehensive Pictorial Record of our Heritage: 1839–1939’; and their ‘Position Paper— February 1983’. Australian National Library bibliographer Victor Crittenden hailed the latter project as “most important,” an;

“…endeavour to create a comprehensive national index of photographic images. Entitled for the present ‘Australia as Australians saw it’, this project is to canvass the public to arouse awareness of the importance of photographs of the past; to invite the public to submit photographs and to allow them to be copied, and to provide a subject approach to the photographs, with appropriate cross-references, by means of a computer-based indexing program.”

Their idea was mercilessly critiqued by Tim Robinson of the Council of the City of Sydney Archives for the ambitious scale of a project that would digitise 500,000 images and computerise their cataloguing, storage and retrieval;

“It is obvious from the submission and the position paper that WOPOP has not the slightest conception of the logistics of copying such a number of photographs, let alone documenting them and ‘fully’ indexing them. Even with the computer programme they describe, and there is no evidence that it has been tested in any way, the entire project would be of vast proportions with no guarantee of success. The money would surely be better spent on collections already held and in need of attention.”

WOPOP ceased publication that year, after nine journal issues produced between 1978 and 1983, as well as the proceedings of the 1981 Australian Photography Conference from 1981 at Prahran College, when McGillivray and Nickson moved on to inaugurate the Museum of Victoria’s Outreach Project in 1985 to realise their ambition, expressed in that last issue, to compile a national archive of Australian documentary, vernacular and historically significant photographs up to 1939, the centenary of the Daguerreotype.

To do so, the pair issued a call for Australians: “to sit down with your family, look through your collection of photographs and select those which you and your family think should be included in the heritage of Australia,” requesting specifically photographs of “members of your family at work, play, or engaged in leisure time activities…”.

McGillivray had already produced, in 1983,  a 35 page publication The origins of moving pictures for the Museum of Victoria, Melbourne.

Several Australian contributors to WOPOP: Working Papers on Photography, including Jenni Mather and Graeme Johanson, went on to publish books of substantial photo-historical research, and Jenny Carew’s articles for other journals treated historical subjects.

As Catherine De Lorenzo notes in her essay ‘Agency and Authorship in Australian Photo Histories,’ in the 2015 Photography, History, Difference edited by Tanya Sheehan;

“The most prolific Australian contributor to the journal, and the only one to address photographic historiography, was Anne-Marie Willis. In her 1980 article on “Problems and Issues in Writing a History of Australian Photography,” Willis sought to define the dilemma facing the photo historian. She framed it thus: to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of a photo history based only on images that are distinctively photographic, aesthetic, and “straight” ( as established by Beaumont Newhall at the Museum of Modern Art in the United States), can leave the researcher vulnerable to such an unwieldy array of photographs about endless subjects and associated disciplines that the very idea of a history of photography becomes questionable. Her wry conclusion was that photography’s pervasiveness across many fields “allows it to belong to every institution but itself:’

“Willis’s argument was the most ambitious at the time, and it reveals an underlying concern that photography, so recently embraced by the art institutions, was all too rapidly becoming identified with a high art interest in form and print quality alone. Willis’s 1988 history continued her investigation of”institutional forces; an approach that typified much photographic research at the time. Yet, with the exception of Willis’s Picturing Australia, little of this radical restructuring of the discourse is evident in subsequent histories.”

Euan McGillivray, most recently an advisor to the Bendigo Historical Society. In September 2023 it was announced its Specimen Cottage was becoming a community museum after he had helped in securing State Government funding of $14,000  the Local History Grants Program. He spent over 35 years after leaving Prahran as a cultural sector/museum curator and manager. He developed collections, exhibitions, and experiences at Museums Victoria and was instrumental in establishing Scienceworks, Melbourne Museum, and the Immigration Museum.

The anonymous editor of the State Library of Victoria blog reflects on Euan and Matthew’s major project;

“In 1988…the State Library of Victoria and Museum Victoria worked together on a videodisk for pictures. The Museum was a pioneer in collecting digital copies of historical photographs, through the work of Matthew Nickson and Ewan McGillivray; at the same time, the State Library had a large collection of historic pictures. Paradoxically, the Museum’s Biggest Family Album project, from 1985-1991, led to the publication of some nice books too, such as Mum and Dad Made History.

“Who can forget the threateningly voluminous CD-ROM avalanche in the early to mid-90s? It was such a brilliant idea to publish journals in digital, searchable form. Not so great an idea to use the CD-ROM and, even more problematical and fiscally alarming, the CD-ROM juke-box.

“The brief age of the CD-ROM soon passed as more and more content was created online, or moved online as it was digitised. Fortunately, in the mid-90s digital content started to move online, until now, digital content in a physical form is almost redundant.

“When he retired from Museum Victoria, I think around 2003, Matthew Nickson suggested that Victoria’s cultural broadband network was in reality successor to the pioneering 1988 videodisc – its role, the transmission and dissemination of cultural content and information. He sent me a copy of our original submission, to prove it.

“It is striking how quickly these innovative, transformational technologies – videodisc and CD-ROM became not only irrelevant, but dinosaurs.”

Matthew Nickson, born 14 July 1948 in Melbourne, is now retired and living in central Victoria, and has continued to agitate on community and heritage issues.

[Note: some content for this post on comes from the Wikipedia article on WOPOP researched and written by James McArdle, up to October 2022]