Stand Up and Fight!
Photographs by John Ellis
New International Bookshop Gallery, Trades Hall, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton, Melbourne
November 30-December 21
Monday to Friday, 9.30am-6.30 pm
Saturdays, 11am-5pm
MELBOURNE — This excellent exhibition includes some 350 images taken by documentary photographer John Ellis. They capture activism and the struggle for social change, featuring a broad cross-section of society. The period covered is 1971 to 1998 and represents an important historical record of people and the issues that have confronted them and helped shape the views of a nation.
Stand Up and Fight! was first displayed at the Steps Gallery in Lygon Street, Carlton, during May 1998. It was opened by Professor Stuart Macintyre and Wendy Lowenstein and attracted about 600 visitors during its 10-day showing. It was then shown at the South-West Trades and Labor Council Gallery in Portland (1999), the Winter School on Advocacy and Social Action at Trades Hall, Melbourne (1999), the Baillieu Library (1999) and at the Seventh Labor History Conference at the Australian National University, Canberra (2001).
Part of the John Ellis Collection resides at the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) and documents the anti-Vietnam war campaign of the 1960s and '70s, the annual Hiroshima Day and Palm Sunday marches, anti-nuclear and anti-uranium mining protests, Aboriginal rights actions, the Save Albert Park campaign, the campaign against logging in the Otways, May Day events, the East Timor solidarity movement and the struggle of the maritime workers. There are also photographs from Cuba and the United States taken in 1996.
The UMA's deputy archivist Suzanne Fairbanks describes the John Ellis Collection as being "without peer ... in Victoria and possibly Australia. It would be one of the most complete, valuable and useful records of political activism in the past 25 years and an essential memorial to the citizens whose passions about peace, nuclear issues, the environment and a host of other matters led them into activism".
Around 1000 of Ellis' photos can be accessed from the UMA web site at .
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 20, 2002.
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