All the Rage: 150 Years of Posters

In its progress from public notice, the poster changed from using letterpress and some wood-engraved illustrations to the widespread use of colour lithography in the late 1860s. In Victoria, it was brought to a high level of achievement by post-gold rush German immigrants, including Charles Troedel. Through the gift of the Troedel Collection in 1968 the State Library acquired 394 chalk and coloured lithographed posters printed by the Troedel Company from the 1860s up to World War I. These single sheet posters advertise theatrical performances, food and drink, land subdivisions, agricultural products and machinery, and a surprising number of laundry products such as Silver Star starch and blue-bags.

Amongst the artists who worked for Troedel was Richard Wendel, a German who arrived in Melbourne in 1877. There are about 40 signed examples of his poster work in the Troedel Collection, the most striking of which is probably the Ideal Velveteen poster.

Theatre posters are another strength of the State Library collections with several hundred held in the Coppin Collection (Australian Manuscripts Collection) and several in the Troedel Collection. In 1979 a chance discovery during renovation of a cottage in Richmond resulted in the additon of thirty-two Theatre Royal letterpress posters from 1865, advertising performances by Barry Sullivan. These had been used as insulation in the roof of the cottage. Their survival was amazing, but making them accessible was a minor miracle. They had been pasted over - as each performance was finished, the next poster would be pasted over the old. In a painstaking process that took nearly two years, the posters were washed in a specially purchased child's wading pool in the Library basement and gradually separated, then backed and eventually stored. One example, advertising Barry Sullivan in The Son of the Wilderness on Friday 16 June 1865, will be seen in 'All the Rage'.

The theatrical poster collection was augmented by the acquisition of 516 examples from the Australian Performing Group in 1982, but since the founding of Melbourne's Performing Arts Museum, the Library has scaled down its collecting in this field.

Another collection strength is travel posters. The two forces behind these in the 1920s and 1930s were the Victorian Railways and the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA), and the common element was Harold Crisp (1875-1952) who was chairman of both. Some examples from the series of posters commissioned by him for ANTA from 1929 onwards were included in 'All the Rage'. The three outstanding artists producing travel posters were Gert Sellheim, an Estonian who trained as an architect in Germany and arrived in Australia in 1925, Percy Trompf and James Northfield. The main donors of travel posters to the State Library were Mr Charles Weetman, who worked for ANTA and Walkabout magazine, and Mr John T Collins, an art teacher who used examples he collected in the 1950s and 1960s to pin up in school classrooms.

Among recent acquisitions are a collection of 95 billboard and smaller posters collected by Mr Nicolaas van Roosendael and used as film props in the 1980s. These were gifts to the Library in 1996 and 1997. The poster for Yates Garden Seeds shows an idealised landscape reminiscent of England and declares:

This is Australia, but we - and you - really wish it were England. Buy our seeds and grow a part of England in your suburban front garden.

World War I was memorable for its hatred and savagery. The most famous of the Australia World War I posters are six designed by Norman Lindsay in 1918 in a last-ditch effort to encourage more men to enlist. Only one was actually posted before the Armistice. In World War II, posters made fun of Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Although the theatre of war was on Australia's doorstep and not in distant Europe, posters seemed to concentrate on raising money through loans and bonds rather than demonising the enemy.

Note: 'All the Rage', which showed 80 posters from the Library's collections was on display 10 August - 21 October 2001. 

Illustrations

Top left: Richard Wendel, The Ideal Velveteen Eclipses All Others, c1881-90
Top center: James Northfield, Mildura on the Murray, c1930-39
Top right: John Ferres, To the Right Worshipful the Mayor of Melbourne... [from] the Undersigned Inhabitants of Melbourne, Considering the Unsettled State of a Portion of the Diggings...,  5 December [1854]
Below: Hollander & Govett Ltd, Road to Health, 1939