David Wadelton – Small Business

Small Business is a companion volume to David Wadelton’s Suburban Baroque – with the focus this time on work rather than domestic spaces. Designed once again by Yanni Florence and with an accompanying essay by Professor Natalie King OAM, Small Business looks at the small but enduring family-run businesses-often tucked away on suburban streets-that are now rapidly fading away. David Wadelton has gathered a considerable photographic archive of these interiors from all over Melbourne and regional Victoria over the last ten years with a couple of side excursions to iconic interstate locations. Many of the businesses have traded for decades, and continue to do so even as multi-storey developments and multi-nationals overshadow or consume them. One third of the shops featured in the book have already closed since they were photographed. Many of the interiors depicted are family businesses started by post-war migrants who came to Australia to start a new life and in so doing enriched and transformed our culture. The layouts featured are often pragmatic and utilitarian, arranged decades ago – often without regard for conventional design trends – and left that way. Some were on trend in their day but now look like museum settings. Still others fall on a wide spectrum from spartan, all the way to a tangled disorder that makes sense only to the proprietor. Whatever form taken they are a time-capsule of a generation who toiled in their shop for decades.

This collection is an ode to the overlooked, the obsolete – to those who march to a different drum.

172 pages, 23.5 x 23.5 cm, hardcover, M.33 (Melbourne).