A man's body lies crumpled in a grubby stairwell, his limbs twisted like a dropped puppet. A woman's stocking-clad feet protrude from beneath a grimy blanket. Dingy bedsits provide the backdrop to transient lives and forgotten crimes.
A new exhibition of black and white photographs from the 1920s and 1930s provides a glimpse of Sydney that is far removed from today's postcard image of shimmering harbour and sun-kissed Opera House. The photographs of the city's shadowy underworld were taken by police as they investigated murders, rapes, assaults, burglaries and car accidents. They reveal a hard-bitten city of crumbling tenements and terrace houses, dark alleys and dead-end streets.
'It was smoky, greasy and dirty, not the glitzy Sydney that we know today,' said Peter Doyle, a crime novelist and curator who put together the exhibition at the Justice and Police Museum. Doyle spent three years holed up in the museum's attic, combing through thousands of police photographs that had lain abandoned for decades after being rescued from a flood. The early negatives are on glass plate; the later ones on acetate.
Digitally scanned and printed, they are astonishingly sharp and focused. Pickpockets and prostitutes stare out of official mug shots with piercing eyes. Were it not for the old-fashioned suits and dresses, the pictures could have been taken yesterday.
The later shots, from the 1940s, are straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, with steely eyed, hard men dressed in sharp suits and fedoras. They offer a huge amount of unintended background detail on ordinary life, from billboards and posters to shopfronts and ordinary people's dress.
The records that originally accompanied the negatives have been lost, so Doyle and a team of amateur researchers had to try to match anonymous places and faces with contemporary newspaper stories and police reports. Dogged detective work - and a fair bit of informed guesswork - has uncovered fascinating insights into the Depression-era demi-monde of thieves, pimps, con men and cocaine addicts.
