Marrickville, Sydney: Photographer documents one of Australia's coolest suburbs for 54 years

It’s been voted one of the 10 coolest places to live in the world, and long-time resident Emmanuel Angelicas has absolutely no doubt that’s right on the mark – and the money.

Having moved to the inner-west Sydney suburb of Marrickville in 1969, the photographer has now been charting its progress for 54 years.

“I’ve travelled all around the world, but Australia, I know, is the best country to live in by far,” said Angelicas, 60. “Whenever I come back from being overseas, I always bend down and kiss the tarmac. But, in Australia, the very best place to live is Marrickville.

“It has changed over the years but it remains a cultural melting pot from the time the first southern European migrants arrived with their culture packed in one suitcase and having their other foot in Australian culture. It is a wonderful place with a lot of interesting, sometimes quirky, people.”

Angelicas has spent almost a lifetime devoted to tracking the evolution of Marrickville. It started out as a grungy industrial hub with a lot of original Victorian and Federation housing, and is now a suburb where a lot of business still goes on, and with lots of restored heritage housing after the cultural vandalism, and tearing down of old buildings, from the 1970s and through the 1990s.

Some gems from his extensive collection of colour photography, Marrickville Chroma, are to be featured as part of the Head On Photo Festival, the biggest photographic exhibition of its kind in the country, which takes place across Sydney and online from November 10 to December 3.

His observations behind the camera are always frank and honest, especially as he uses a short lens to capture his subjects, so the feeling is one of rare, and upfront, intimacy.

His photographs capture a variety of different subjects, including migrant communities, street life, idiosyncratic individuals and unexpected places.

The exhibition of Angelicas’s work has been curated by Alan Davies, emeritus curator of photographs at the State Library of NSW.

“This new colour exhibition is a peek into photographer Emmanuel Angelicas’s long-term love affair with the place in which he was raised and still lives today,” Davies said.

“It is an affectionate observation of the many people and diverse communities that call inner-city Marrickville home.

“The photographer is probably best known for his 50-year archive of moody black and white images, so for many, this exhibition will be a startling look at a colourful, modern Marrickville. [His] latest photographs are an eclectic, confident, quirky celebration of people, much like Marrickville itself.”

Angelicas has only just returned from a trip to Greece, where he has an exhibition of that black-and-white work now showing in Thessaloniki until mid-February 2024.

Angelicas says his Marrickville photo project was almost entirely based on the migrant community he grew up with.

“Despite the incomprehensible uncertainty of the radically new-world city swirling around them, they found solace in their solidarity and familiar rituals created over millennia past,” he said.

“The Australian-born children of these migrants changed everything. They sought an identity of their own, bred of a rage to see that they were different; that they belonged – not just in Sydney, but as part of the new evolving narrative of the whole country.”

The Marrickville Angelicas says he grew up in was a Sydney municipality built in the 1870s to house Anglo-Saxon working-class people. A hundred years later, it had become colonised by post-World War II migrants from Europe.

“Real estate was cheap, because the area had been abandoned by the now upwardly mobile Anglo cohort, who had benefitted greatly from the wages boom of the mid-1960s and the freeing up of credit by successive governments,” he said.

“These generations of families had moved on to a more spacious and futuristic suburban Pleasantville called Western Sydney.”

In the 1970s, a Valuer General’s Department of Real Estate report shows that it was more expensive to live in Wollongong – with a median property price of $42,500 – than Marrickville, at $37,000.

But that’s all a long time ago. Today, the latest Domain House Price Report reveals that Marrickville has a median house price of $3.76 million, up 5.7 per cent over the past 12 months. Its median unit price is $1.67 million, up 9.9 per cent on last year.

And Wollongong? Its houses have a median of $1.15 million and units, $680,000. “I have two properties in Marrickville that I bought for very little 20 years ago,” Angelicas said. “I’ve just had them valued at $3 million each, which is ridiculous. If only I had known, I should have bought the whole street!”

The Head On Photo Festival is staging more than 100 exhibitions across Sydney and has a record 702 emerging and professional photographers from Australia and across the globe competing for $70,000 in prizes.

Festival founder and creative director Moshe Rosenzveig said the exhibitions include five on Ukraine, one on a bikie gang in Iraq, some about logging in Tasmania, others on ageing, motherhood, anorexia and Holocaust survivors decades after World War II,

“Sometimes an exhibition shines light on a group of people most of us hardly ever think about,” he said.

The Head On Photo Festival runs from November 10 to December 3