A week ago, I published a short post entitled
Images that stimulate our imagination [
display]. Well, friends at Gallica tweeted me a thank-you, along with a link to a gift.
The "little souvenir from Australia" was a set of snapshots from an album dated 1925 housed at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France. Click
here to visit the original website. I've cleaned up and slightly rearranged some of the images, which I shall now present.
On 27 March 1925, a young woman and her parents left Europe on the maiden voyage to the Antipodes of the
SS Cathay, built in Glasgow, belonging to the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, better known as P&O.
Launched five months earlier, on 31 October 1924, the
Cathay was designed to carry some 200 first-class and 100 second-class passengers. In the illustration, no smoke is emerging from the second funnel. There's a good reason for this. That second funnel was a dummy, placed there for purely esthetic reasons.
In Sydney, in 1925, St Andrew's Anglican cathedral and the Town Hall looked much like they do today:
[Click to enlarge]
Circular Quay was a tram terminus.
The trio stayed at the
Hampton Court Hotel near Kings Cross.
Recently, this building—which I remember well from my Sydney days—looked like this:
In 1925, Elizabeth Bay and Rose Bay were charming places, as they still are.
The tourists seem to have been attracted to the golf club in Rose Bay.
I've cheated a little by merging two photos together in order to obtain this interesting image of a shark tower at Coogee beach:
On the north shore of the harbor (not yet girded by Sydney's famous bridge), Neutral Bay and the Spit Bridge haven't changed greatly over the years.
There are many other images in the album, including photos from New Zealand.
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