Part 10: The Golden Age of Travel Posters

Hand in hand with the growth of leisure and tourism in Victoria was the production of posters advertising new beachside township estates, holiday destinations, and activities. In the Victorians on Vacation exhibition there are many fine examples, including Charles Troedel & Co’s late-19th-century poster advertising the Australian Trent Brewery and Harold Freedman’s superb 1950s poster advertising Hepburn Springs and Daylesford.

The 1920s and 30s have been dubbed the Golden Age of poster design in Australia. This was partly due to the efforts of the Victorian Railways and the Australian National Travel Association (or ANTA) to promote tourism and outdoor recreation during this period by commissioning posters from the best commercial artists of the day.

The most popular and well-known artists employed by the tourism agencies were Percy Trompf, James Northfield and Gert Sellheim. These three artists met regularly at the Art Training Institute in Melbourne where they taught graphic design and poster art. Tom Purvis, an English designer who also worked for ANTA during this period, noted that ‘a good poster should not puzzle people, it should be like a boxer’s punch - straight, hard, and quick - and should deliver its message in a flash’. This was certainly a hallmark of the posters produced by Northfield, Sellheim and Trompf, whose poster designs combined striking images and simple text.

Gert Sellheim, an Estonian, trained as an architect in Germany and arrived in Australia in 1925. He brought a European modernist approach to the depiction of quintessentially Australian life. His bright and striking designs promoting seaside holidays combined strong diagonals with curved lines to indicate surf or sand, or, as in the 1936 work Australia - Surf Club, lifesavers on the beach. Sellheim’s poster designs were innovative both in terms of technique and design. In his poster Spring in the Grampians, he uses photographic montage to construct his design, which combines black and white, and colour imagery. Today he is best known as the artist who designed the Qantas flying kangaroo logo.

James Northfield gained a reputation for his mastery of colour printing after serving an apprenticeship with F W Niven & Co, one of Melbourne’s leading lithographic printers. His poster for the Victorian Railways, Mildura - For Winter Sunshine, shows his bold use of colour. The image is reminiscent of a scene from a Hollywood movie extravaganza - the cornucopia of fruit and the model’s flamboyant orange hat and yellow pants. Northfield’s posters were designed for both the international and domestic markets. His poster Winter Sport in Australie, shows a couple skiing at Mount Buffalo. The text is in Dutch, as the poster was aimed at expatriates living in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where opportunities for skiing must have seemed impossibly remote. The poster promotes the ski fields as being ‘only twelve days from Java’, an indication of the time it took to travel in the early 20th century. The same image also appeared in an English-language version for Australian holiday-makers.

Another of the designers favoured by the Victorian Railways and ANTA was Percy Trompf. Trompf established a studio in Little Collins Street where he painted and designed advertising posters for Bryant & May, Palmolive and Walkabout magazine. In the 1930s his design for a bunch of apples won him first prize in the annual industrial poster competition conducted by the Royal Society of Arts in London. In Trompf’s poster for the Victorian Railways, Bendigo the Golden City, the shadow of the towering gold mine appears in the clouds above the city’s main boulevard.

The outbreak of World War II led to a suspension of the demand for travel posters. After the war, colour photography and screenprinting gradually replaced commercial artwork and zinc plates. By the late 1950s the strong images and simple text that typified poster design before the war had virtually disappeared. Today travel posters are replaced by brochures, magazines, television programs and websites.