Women waiting at an Adelaide bus stop

WALL LABEL: Robert McFarlane: In Memory [display], 2023

This photograph was taken in Glenelg by McFarlane on a visit back to

Adelaide in 1975. 

I was in that general area.  I turned the corner and there was a bus stop.  The moment I saw them I just thought of the absurdity of it.  They were dressed absolutely, as we used to say, ‘to the nines’ in evening gowns.

When AGSA exhibited this photograph in 2010 we discovered the identity of the two girls, flatmates who were going to a disco at the Old Lion Hotel, North Adelaide. Reminiscing about the image, the girl on the left – who was wearing a leaf-green sequinned dress, purchased from Alice’s In Gear in Rundle Street – said, ‘in those days we got dressed like that and we went out much earlier …’  Neither of the girls had a car, so each Saturday, dressed in evening gowns, they caught the bus to go to a disco and ‘thought nothing of it’.

                Julie Robinson, Senior Curator, Prints, Drawings & Photographs