talked about her introduction to photography, it was in terms of self-identification. At different times during her life, she said it was “my medium”, “my thing”, which she embraced because of what she recognised as its creative, self-expressive potential.
Olive and Max grew closer during the late 1930s, and it cannot have been a surprise to anyone when they finally decided to marry. For their honeymoon, they drove to Canberra in Max’s roadster. It was Olive’s first visit to the national capital, which, with a population of around 11,500, was still small. On their return, they set up house together in rental properties, firstly in a flat in Balmoral on Sydney’s lower north shore, then in a house on Longueville Road in Lane Cove, which gave easy access via ferry to the city and the studio.
The images from 1939 particularly have a heightened sensuousness and suggest a quietly ecstatic state of being. In one of these,, this comes from being in tune with the natural world and being able to recognise meaningful patterns in nature, their delicacy and complexity. As she later said of the work and its significance to her: “Each grass head outlined by a nimbus of light from the setting sun and the sun’s rays themselves all create, for me, a magical atmosphere.
Max later described the amalgamation in colourful terms: “[In] early 1941, Hartland & Hyde were inducing the painful birth of colour photography in Sydney. It should have been a caesarean, but instead it laboured on until natural resources dried up and a stillbirth seemed imminent. I was asked to apply whatever life-giving support I could and breathe fresh energy into the ailing infant.”
That Olive returned to Max on weekends during June and July suggests she may not have planned to leave the marriage. Perhaps, at first, she wanted time on her own to think, or to develop a plan to put to Max, in an attempt to improve their failing relationship. Perhaps she had already tried to initiate change over the previous year or two and was feeling that she had exhausted all possibilities. Then again, there may have been an incident that prompted her to take action.
Barbara Beck, who socialised with the couple in Sydney, told me in 2016 that she felt Max treated Olive “like a piece of furniture”. She stressed that they had known each other for “a very, very long time” before finally marrying, implying that they were so familiar with each other, there was no romance left and the relationship had already run its course.Olive made only two public statements that give any inkling of possible reasons for their break-up.
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