Part 11: Matthew Sleeth & Rosebud

As the 20th century progressed, a more prosperous middle class with greater leisure time and mobility continued to embrace the annual summer beach holiday. Particularly since the arrival of affordable motor cars, families have loaded up their cars and trailers and headed off to locations along the Victorian coast.

Indeed, for many, summer holidays are now synonymous with an extended residence - literally on the beach. On the Mornington Peninsula, for example, we all know when summer holiday season is in full swing by the number of trailers, tents and caravans crowded into the beachside camping grounds that hug the coastline.

Matthew Sleeth is an acclaimed photographer, based in Melbourne. He has produced a number of significant series of works, including Tour of Duty, which observed the Australian troops in East Timor. Sleeth’s photographs blur the boundaries between art and documentary photography.

With his Rosebud series he finds darkness as well as light in the annual summer holiday at the beach. As a child Sleeth had holidayed annually at the seaside town of Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula in the 1970s. His photographs capture the timeless nature of camping on the foreshore, card games by gas light, Christmas dinner in the annexe, beach side cafes and teenage mating rituals. On his recent return to Rosebud, Sleeth found that while some things had changed, much remained the same. He wrote:

Teenagers were still having awkward first kisses, families were returning year after year, re-creating their suburban comforts on a miniature scale, albeit with a modern twist - transistor radios had given way to DVD players, station wagons to four-wheel drives. A sense of community and continuity remained and I remembered these with great affection, but the underlying currents of boredom and slight menace were also familiar.