She was a loving witness to our changing city. How did we forget her?

Melbourne of old was all about the smells. Fresh-picked tomatoes trucked from Shepparton to the White Crow sauce factory in Spencer Street, the hops at Carlton & United Breweries, tobacco from the British Tobacco Company and the Arnotts and Brockhoff biscuit factories, respectively famous for their Scotch fingers and Savoys.

That’s what Francis McMahon remembers most about living in North Melbourne in the 1950s and the following decades. The 78-year-old North Melbourne-born and bred McMahon recalls a very different Melbourne to the one we know now. Back in his day, all the locals shopped at the Queen Victoria Market and most used a pram to cart their wares; it was a real community, where everyone knew everyone.

It’s a time he’s revisiting inside City Gallery at Melbourne Town Hall, where the exhibition On The Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne is being shown.

Gibb, who died in 2017, documented the world around her. Mainly in portraits of the people but also their daily lives – with their partners, children and pets, in their houses, shops and streets. Her stunning black and white photographs reflect an interest in everyone: babies, teens, oldies, families, neighbours, squatters, wharfies, market workers, refugees, shopkeepers, barbers and publicans, immigrants and the homeless; people of all colours and creeds.

Looking through the 250-odd images in the exhibition, McMahon cannot only name many in the portraits, he remembers their addresses; Mr Williams, the area’s barber back in the day, is someone he’s particularly keen to see.

When he was five, McMahon’s grandmother – who lived next to the White Crow factory – would take him to Williams’ house in Spencer Street on a Sunday, where he, along with other neighbourhood kids, would sit on the verandah and have his hair cut.

The woman who recorded this life is not as well-known as she deserves to be, but the exhibition aims to address that. Born in Bobinawarrah, near Wangaratta, in 1945, Gibb trained as a painter and printmaker before taking up photography. She studied at Wangaratta Technical College, the National Gallery of Victoria Art School and the Victorian College of the Arts, and finished her formal studies in the mid-1970s.

Working with a Rolleiflex medium format camera and a 4×5-inch Graflex Speed Graphic, she developed and printed all her own work.

Her photographs were first exhibited at Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery in 1978, followed by solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1980 and the Experimental Art Foundation, in Adelaide, in 1981 and 1991. She didn’t make the move into digital photography, instead returning to painting around 2000.

The exhibition’s curator, Savannah Smith, says Gibb’s empathy for others is clear from the images; it shines through in the trust her subjects clearly have in her.

“They’re very personal photos. You can sense people’s trust, that they know her. She had these relationships with people and that was fundamental to the work. She wasn’t a street photographer, just snapping people she didn’t know. She knew everyone in this very small section of the city.”

The exhibition was made possible through a donation to the Melbourne Art Trust in 2025 of more than 200 black-and-white silver gelatin prints, by Gibb’s daughter Sybil Gibb and son Rupert Duffy.

Both appear in the show, in one image as young children with Alice Garner, graffitiing a door in chalk with the words “F--- Vote Labor’. It was taken at the house in Capel Street Gibb shared with Alice’s mother, Helen Garner, who wrote Monkey Grip while living there (see Garner’s essay, below).

The images were delivered in photo albums with captions written by Gibb, and a suitcase filled with pictures, which Sybil helped identify and caption. They capture a particular time in Melbourne’s history, says Smith. “What you’re seeing is actually this community on the precipice of change, it’s the start of the story that we know of gentrification, that really sweet spot in time where a lot of young people were able to live in the inner city with no worries. They were able to live and produce work, they had space to be able to be creative. That is a story that’s still very relevant today to conversations about urban life – [questions about] who is the city for? What do we do in the city?”

Smith says Gibb’s work was underpinned by her political beliefs and worldview. She set up a cadetship for Indigenous people, which included acclaimed artist Maree Clarke as one of its first recipients.

“She was alive to the forces of change impacting the lives of those around her and fiercely critical of one social class or race dominating another,” Smith writes in the catalogue. “[Gibb] was also deeply concerned about the treatment and deprivations of First Nations people and the plight of those establishing new lives in Australia.

“She really didn’t like seeing people doing it tough and seeing them forced out of their homes, not being able to live the lives that they wanted to live.”

In the catalogue for her 1980 exhibition at the NGV, Gibb wrote: “The people in my photographs are those who have survived at all odds – socially, racially and economically – in our essentially bourgeois society; the lonely man next door, the old people who have lived in the area all their lives and are threatened with eviction, the homeless man whose only dream is to have a room of his own.

“In photographing the commonplace of the apparently trivial event of a woman holding her baby or a man standing in front of his home, I can see the transformation of a moment into a story unfolded by observation; the little dog by her side, the tender way the man puts his hand on her shoulder, the expression in her eyes, the garden, the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the city skyscrapers in the background and the traffic zooming past. The details fit together like pieces of a jigsaw, presenting a story of a lifetime and a constant reminder of the fragility of life itself.”

Much of the first part of the City Gallery show is centred around the Capel Street house and neighbourhood, then another home Gibb had in Hawke Street. Within just a few streets, a whole world is documented. The other half is dedicated to Victoria Street, with photos of people going to and from the market, daily activity on the street including people outside their houses, the Miami Hotel, the Don Camillo cafe – a favourite haunt of hers – the barbers, the pub, and Hound Dog’s Bop Shop, a popular record store that hosted live rockabilly every Saturday.

“From religious rituals to street festivals, countercultural movements to everyday domestic moments, Gibb created a democratic portrait of urban life – one that foregrounds dignity, connection and the complexities of change,” Smith writes in the catalogue.

In 1983, the National Gallery of Victoria’s then-curator, Jennie Boddington, described Gibb’s images as “some of the richest work being done in this country”, and noted the warmth and empathy embedded in them. Gibb’s work is held in collections around the country. This latest donation fleshes out the story of Melbourne and is a significant addition to the City Gallery’s collection.

Smith says it is fitting the gallery has works by Ruth Madison and Ponch Hawkes – Gibb’s contemporaries – and Maree Clarke, too. “It feels really special that she is put back into history because her story, it’s gone quiet. It hasn’t been forgotten necessarily but it really deserves to be celebrated,” Smith says.

About Viva

By Helen Garner

In the mid-1970s, when the big Fitzroy group household I was part of collapsed and died, Viva had just found a house to rent in Capel Street, West Melbourne. We were single mothers. I had a daughter, she had a daughter and a son; we all moved in together.

How the hell did we fit? The house had three storeys but was very, very small: you went in through a side door off a narrow lane (which led to Queen Victoria Market). At ground level it had an outside bathroom and dunny, a weeny kitchen where we ate, and a room where the kids slept, stacked in bunks. A tight staircase. First floor, two rooms: Viva needed the west-facing front one for her grand, curtained bed and her wardrobe, though how the furniture was squeezed up those stairs I cannot remember; I was a puritan minimalist and took the back room with its toy-sized, two-briquette fireplace and a chimney that worked. Up a ladder there was a minuscule attic, in which, on a spare bed that filled its space entirely, your boyfriend could sleep on nights when you could not stand him.

All I could do was write, but Viva was a country woman, a person of awesome practical skills. She showed me how to grow tomatoes and basil. She even knew how to make yoghurt; when she tried to teach me, I dropped the thermometer in the sink and slashed my finger open, blood everywhere, I had to dip it in molasses to make it stop. Now, 50 years later, I still proudly bear the scar. She could sew things, and mend them, and cook, and make a household. The kids dressed like urchins, drew and skipped and chalked rude words and political slogans on the pavements. They sang and did shows to make us laugh.

I forget how long my daughter and I lived there, or why and when we went back to North Fitzroy, where we came from. But Viva and her children stayed. I see now that as the years rolled on she was sinking deeply into her corner of our city, quietly absorbing it and its people into her artist’s imagination, her historian’s archive. She observed and listened; she paid attention. She treasured, she preserved. She walked for miles, streaming along West Melbourne streets with her dogs trotting at her heel. Her heart was open to the world she had chosen. She served it, she made it hers, and her work shows the profound sincerity of that love.

On The Street Where I Live: Viva Gibb’s portrait of North and West Melbourne is at City Gallery, Melbourne, March 12–August 7.

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