Shooting Through: Sydney by Tram

An exhibition about Sydney's lost tram network offers a glimpse into the city's past – and possibly its future too.

Drive your car to work and there'll be blood on the tracks, if Caroline Butler-Bowden has anything to do with it.

"I'm a public transport user and I'm an advocate for it," she says. "It appals me that people drive to their place of work in the CBD and it always will. We've always got a serious intent with exhibitions, and I think this time it's just to raise awareness of what we had in the past with trams."

As the curator of the Museum of Sydney's new exhibition, Shooting Through: Sydney by Tram, Butler-Bowden has revisited the archives of the Sydney Tramway Museum at Loftus to create an interactive glimpse at what life was like in the golden age of Sydney public transport.

Having criss-crossed Sydney for almost 100 years, trams were enormously popular until the 1950s when pressure from the NRMA and other pro-car lobby groups led to the derailing of trams in 1961.

"I mean, I'm no specialist on the political intrigues of the 1950s, but there were definitely several different camps debating whether or not they should be retained," says Butler-Bowden.

"We're using the tram to tell the story of the city [but] the exhibition is presented in the context of where we're headed in terms of public transport in this city. These are the crunch issues of the future."

Butler-Bowden says that the prospect of trams making a comeback has become increasingly likely ever since the 1997 opening of the Light Rail in Sydney's CBD.

"Many of our suburbs were built after the tram lines went through them, whereas today we build suburbs and think about the infrastructure after, so I think they're a lesson.

"Obviously they'd be expensive to reinstate and there are so many other challenges but they were much loved."

Butler-Bowden hopes that, as well as igniting discussion, the exhibition will provide a chance to relive the days when riding on public transport in Sydney was actually fun.

"There's a very tactile part to the exhibition - you can touch things, you can turn destination reels, you can climb into the tram cabin.

"The whole experience of travelling on a tram, in a sense, put a very human face on Sydney. The city, the citizens and the experience of the journey all came together." Millie Stein