Community
25 October, 2025
Snapshots in time: Bealiba featured in historic image drop
Among the first images captured by the Committee for Urban Action are of Bealiba.
THE first of 70,000 photographs of heritage buildings in rural Victoria and metropolitan Melbourne 50 years ago have been digitised by the State Library of Victoria.
Among the first images captured by the Committee for Urban Action are of Bealiba.
The State Library says that in the 1970s, concerned by the destruction of Victoria’s building heritage, the Committee for Urban Action photographed an extraordinary number of streetscapes in inner-city Melbourne and regional towns.
The collection of more than 2000 reels of 35mm film – more than 70,000 photographs – was donated to the Library by Barbara Nevin on behalf of the CUA in 1977.
“A vast Google-style photographic survey, the CUA streetscapes capture inner-city and regional architecture in the late 20th century. The details in these images offer a rich record of urban life and form the basis of the heritage overlays still used in town planning today,” the library said. The pilot project to digitise the collecton has seen 3000 images placed on the State Library’s website.
Here are some of the Bealiba images of shops open and shut in the early 1970s.
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