Newtown in the 1940s

A woman stands on a slatted wooden crate in a Newtown street in 1942 and preaches to whoever has stopped. Around her are uniformed officers, a flag bearer, a bass drum, brass. The crowd is adults and children with their heads bowed, standing in the roadway because there is nowhere else to stand.

The Salvation Army had been doing this on these streets for sixty years by then. The Newtown corps opened on 1 April 1883, the second in Sydney, under the pioneer Salvationist Edward Saunders — a qualified stonemason, who had a hall up and open by 15 March 1884. The corps picked up a nickname, as they all did, and was known as the Newtown Nuggets. The citadel outlasted the century: it became a branch library in 1995.

What makes these worth looking at is that they are photographs of ordinary religion done in public, in wartime, by people who had no doubt at all that the footpath was the right place for it. A procession moves off behind a flag bearer with women members following and the band behind them. Three women stand at the front of an assembly outside the citadel holding flags, two furled and one open, with a tuba and the rest of the brass ranked at their backs.

Nobody is performing for a camera in any of it. The camera is just the thing that happened to be there on the day the Army came down the street.