Published: 2 March 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
FROM AN EARLY AGE, Ruth Maddison knew her father, Sam Goldbloom, was being watched. “He used to tell us not to worry about the men sitting in the car in front of the house … we were aware the clicks on the phone meant ‘they’ were listening too,” the award-winning Melbourne-born photographer says.
“They” were the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In the 1940s, Goldbloom’s anti-fascist ideals drew Asio’s attention. He later joined the Communist party before becoming a major player in the World Peace Council. These associations made him a person of interest for more than 30 years.
While the spy agency’s prolonged surveillance of her father was not news, Maddison says that when her mother, Rosa, died in 2008, she discovered a much more layered history. As she and her two sisters packed up the family home, Maddison was tasked with clearing out her father’s shed. He had died in 1999 but until then no one had gone through “Sam’s stuff”.
There she found packs of slides, video footage from Goldbloom’s numerous peace missions to communist regimes including the USSR, East Germany and Cuba, as well as home movies, correspondence and other paraphernalia related to his activist work.
This discovery became the entry point to The Fellow Traveller, the centrepiece for the first major survey of Maddison’s work, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The survey charts Maddison’s documentary practice from 1976 to the 2000s and opens at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy on February 26.
In the 1950s “fellow traveller” was a derisive term for a communist sympathiser. Maddison uses the term to reflect an imaginary journey with her father.
FULL STORY The communist who raised me: photographer Ruth Maddison interrogates her father's ASIO file (Guardian)
Photo: Sam Goldbloom on stage in Melbourne (1981/2020 Hiroshima Day, Melbourne; image hand coloured and digitally enhanced)
