This Place, Before was a recent photographic study I undertook of Parramatta Road at a moment of pause. Before renewal.
Shown as part of Alchemy and Friends II, the series looked closely at the road’s shopfronts and façades; not as nostalgia, but as evidence. These buildings hold the DNA of the corridor: layers of commerce, entertainment, adaptation, and survival that still shape the place today.
Through direct, façade-focused photographs, the project asks a simple question:
What do we risk losing if we don’t first learn to see what’s already here?
You can see some of the images here.
Midnight Star, 55–57 Parramatta Road, Homebush
Built in 1925 as the Homebush Theatre by architect Charles Bohringer, this Interwar cinema was part of the suburban picture-palace network that once lined Parramatta Road. Its façade carries the ‘HT’ monogram, a distinctive feature Bohringer also used at the Rozelle Theatre (‘RT’). After films stopped in 1959, the building became an ice rink, theatre restaurant, reception venue and briefly a community social centre. It now stands vacant, one of the clearest surviving pieces of the road’s early entertainment era.
