David Mist - Swinging Sydney

They say if you can remember the 60s you weren't really there. Photographer David Mist doesn't agree - he looks upon that time with fond, rose-coloured memories; a time of change, protest and the birth of the ‘teenager'.

Photo gallery
See our exclusive slideshow of Swinging Sydney

Arriving in Sydney from the UK in 1961 as a fashion photographer, he captured the style and flavour of life in Sydney at that time. "I was lucky because I experienced the early part of the 60s in London working in fashion photography and then I experienced it here, which was kind of a variation on it because the early 60s in Australia was full of conservatism. The youth didn't really break out until 1965 in Sydney," says Mist, who still calls Sydney - Paddington to be specific - home. "When I arrived, it was very conservative, it was like chalk and cheese compared to London. It really was June Dally-Watkins country - handbags and gloves and everything that's proper."

But by the mid 60s, everything changed. "It was one long party," says Mist with a hint of nostalgia in his voice. "It wasn't so much the drugs - the only drug around was the huff-puff stuff that we all enjoyed very much at the time. There was never heroin or the more sophisticated drugs that you have today. "It was really the period of the long lunch. I don't know how I took pictures. I used to come back and wonder how I was still standing. There were lots of parties back then."

In between the lunches and parties Mist did actually work, and hard, capturing photos of Sydney's young fashion scene. Working for 15 or so retail outlets - Farmers, David Jones and others - his pictures ran weekly in Sydney's newspapers; photos of models all sporting the latest styles and trends. Commissioned to capture Sydney for the coffee table book Cities of the World, Mist also spent a year snapping Sydney's landmarks and people and at the same time, a unique document of Sydney's history.

So why did Mist stay in Sydney all this time? "I loved the Australian people; I thought they were so easy going and casual," he explains. "I came from a background that was toffee-nosed and rather conservative in its thinking. In London it was ‘Lady this' and ‘Your Honourable' that." 

David Mist: Swinging Sydney opens Sat 27 Sep 08 and runs until 8 Feb 09 at the Museum of Sydney.

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