Mascot in the 1940s
From directly overhead a suburb is a street map. Photographed on the oblique, from a few hundred feet and off to one side, it becomes a place with a horizon — and that is the whole reason these views of Mascot are worth looking at, because in the 1940s the suburb had two different landscapes in it and the oblique catches both in the one frame.
One is market gardens. Cultivated plots in neat rectangles, vacant lots, open paddocks, low-lying ground: this had been the district's main business since the first land grants of 1835, and it survived the subdivision that followed Botany Road in 1875 and the municipality of North Botany formed in 1888. The other is industry — long saw-tooth workshop wings pulling north light into factory floors, a multi-storey works with a taller stair block on the corner, all of it fronting an arterial road with detached single-storey houses filling the gaps between.
A third thing sits just out of frame. The aerodrome had been here since Nigel Love flew off leased paddocks in November 1919; the Commonwealth compulsorily acquired 65 hectares in 1921, commercial flights began in 1924, and in 1936 the field was renamed for Charles Kingsford Smith. Through the 1940s a passenger terminal opened and the Cooks River was diverted so that two new runways could be laid. Ground that grew vegetables was being turned to other purposes.
The photographs are Milton Kent's. He got his pilot's licence in 1926, specialised in the oblique, and by the 1940s was the principal aerial photographer in Sydney — the reason so much of what the city looked like from the air survives at all.
