Two Newcastle artists have created a public photo exhibition honouring the lives and stories of the local elderly community.

The installation can be found in a laneway within East End Village. Photo source: Melanie Muddle.

“Every time an old person dies, it is as if a library burned down.”

This was the quote by Amadou Hampâté Bâ that resonated with creatives Hannah Robinson and Melanie Muddle, inspiring their latest exhibition, And Then, They Were No Longer Invisible.

The creative duo recently embarked on a journey with Novocastrians aged 70 years and older to create new narratives around aging, isolation and ageism.

“Photography is used to tell stories – rather than documenting people, we wanted to create a space where they could invite older folk to share their stories and images for the broader community could connect,” Muddle said.

The exhibition’s current installation is located within the East End Village, in Newcastle East, featuring large-scale paste-up images.

Aupporting digital storytelling through a StoryBank will launch in the coming months.

“We both knew from personal experience that older people in our communities were a bit unseen and unheard, and the pandemic amplified that,” Muddle said.

“We wanted to raise consciousness around ageing in our society, people’s experiences and how isolation has come into that.

“It’s a cultural and historical preservation process on the one hand, but it’s also this uplifting therapeutic process for participants as well.”

Both creatives utilised connections in the community to approach potential participants and opened up a nomination process, where people were nominated by their family, friends and loved ones.

“Through that process, people provided information and part of their story, and we were able to build a database of people,” Muddle said.

“We were overwhelmed with nominations; we had more nominations than places available.”

Muddle said the project encompassed a diverse group of Novocastrians, which made it all the more rewarding to be a part of.

“Within this project, we were constantly challenged and were delighted to engage with the beautiful diversity across the age group – each person’s experience and what they have navigated through their lives is just remarkable,” Muddle said.

“I was taken by the resilience of the people we worked with – they had all experienced this accumulative loss that can happen in a lifetime of losing husbands, partners, siblings and children, as well as homes and businesses.

“All sorts of stories were shared within this project.”

Participants over the age of 70 have shared their life stories to connect with the broader Hunter community. Photo source: Melanie Muddle.

Muddle said it was inspiring to see how their resilience and approach to living had shaped who they were today. 

“There’s a lot we can learn as younger folk in this community from our elders regarding how you navigate bankruptcy, how you navigate losing a partner or the loss of a child,” she said.

“There’s a lot of wisdom and knowledge we can gain from them.”

As a culture, Muddle said it was to our detriment that we often stereotype people based on their age, resulting in a feeling of great redundancy and lack of purpose on our elderly counterparts. 

“One of the participants used to be the Mayor of Cessnock,” Muddle said.

“She shared how older people have so much to give – they’re still capable of thinking and learning new technology and all of the things we seem to write off as a society as people get older.”

As a Redhead resident, Muddle sought the contribution of one particular ageing icon to prove their existing community contribution.  

“There’s this beautiful gentleman John and his dog Monty,” Muddle said.

“They’re iconic in our suburb – John has lived here for 60 years, and everybody knows who he and his dog are … they walk daily, they’re recognised on the street, and John used to take Monty to the preschool to play with the kids.

“It was really important for me that he was included – he’s had such a role to play in this suburb, and it was so beautiful to engage with him and his daughter and see the community connect with his images on the wall.”

Photo source: Melanie Muddle.

From listening to the elders’ stories, Muddle said the duo learnt many valuable lessons.

“One of the other things we learnt is relationships and maintaining strong connections for health and wellbeing, especially later in life,” she said.

“Those relationships help people cope with the challenges they face in their lifetime.”

Time is of the essence for the duo, whose goal is to record more valuable stories before they are lost forever. 

“Once these people are gone, their stories are gone, and the visual representation of a whole era and generation disappears.”

Muddle said the project was made possible by the City of Newcastle’s Community Grant Program and Lake Macquarie City’s Creative Industries Seed Grant, covering printing and material costs.

“This is the first round of a long term project – our goal is to run this program and project across regions and states across Australia to create an archival collection of imagery and recordings that help document this generation and their stories,” Muddle said.

“It’s the first part of a very big and beautiful project.”

Melanie said they also intended to further diversify the project by including Indigenous and refugee communities, as well as the elderly living in rural environments. 

Maia O’Connor