Stories By Multilocus
The National Tally Room
If you live in Australia's national capital of Canberra you cannot help but be exposed to politics at both a local and national level. After all, Canberra was established to be the seat of our national parliament. Located on Capital Hill, Australia's Parliament House dominates the city's landscape and sits at the apex of what is known as the parliamentary triangle.
One advantage of living in Canberra is that as well as being home to the national parliament it is also the home to many of Australia's national institutions such as the National Library, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Australia, Museum of Australian Democracy, National Archives and the Australian War Memorial, to name a few. At every federal election Canberra is also home to the National Tally Room.
The National Tally Room is the large temporary media centre built in the Budawang Building at the Canberra Showground by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to provide a focal point for the display of election results on federal election night. It is unique to Australia, has been a fixture of federal elections for over 45 years and is the largest publicly accessible media event held in the country.
On election night an estimated 700 journalists and staff from radio, television, print and online publications report the progress of the electoral count directly from the floor of the National Tally Room. Whilst many Australians sit at home and watch the election result unfold on television, more than 3000 members of the public pass through the doors to observe and feel 'democracy in action'.
I suspect if you ask people living in Canberra if they have been to all the national institutions many will reply that they haven't but intend to in the near future. Because we live in the city there is always no rush to go.
In March 2007 a proposal was floated to abolish the National Tally Room. For me the National Tally Room was one of those 'Canberra' experiences of which there was always no rush to do. Therefore, with its possible abolition I undertook to visit when the election was called later in the year.
Cutting a long story short I ended up photographing the building, running and dismantling of the 2007 National Tally Room as a private project. The result was 3689 single framed digital photographs, a set of 180-degree panoramas taken three times a day from three fixed locations and a time-lapse video of the entire process of building and running the National Tally Room.
Surprisingly my collection of images is the only continuous record of any Australian National Tally Room build from start to finish.
It turned out to be one of those projects that leave a lasting impression. On the night the crowd in the public area was extremely noisy which created a very dramatic and thrilling atmosphere. The next morning the Canberra Times described the National Tally Room as "a raucous shrine to democracy". Although this raucousness did show through on the television broadcasts you had to be there to fully experience that feeling.
In November 2008 I exhibited a small part of my National Tally Room collection at the Huw Davies Gallery in the Manuka Arts Centre in an exhibition titled "Capturing The Moment For Perhaps The Last Time – The National Tally Room 2007".
.. The result is an impressive collection of photographs, tracking not only the life of the room itself, but an impressive view of the day and the people who inhabited the site, workers and onlookers. Some individual images alone might seem mundane, but place them in the narrative of the National Tally Room and you are drawn along a line of small images. From the smaller shots, Arundel has chosen to enlarge a selection that is filled with rich images (both in the technical sense and the communicative). The larger pix sit above the smaller line and it is tempting to go round the exhibition twice, first following the storyline, then savouring the clean lines, the balance and the depth of the larger shots. At the documentary level, this show is classic photography; the results are valuable historically while each photo is clean, no artifice, extremely well shot. ..."
Garry Raffaele, City News
As it turned out, the 2007 National Tally Room was not the last, and at the beginning of August 2010, three weeks from Polling Day for the 2010 federal election I found myself returning to that "raucous shrine to democracy" to observe and document the process all over again.
I am told each Tally Room has its own feel and none are ever the same. As I began the task I wondered what would Saturday 21 August 2010, be like?
Click to download an extract of my 2007 National Tally Room book "Capturing The Moment For Perhaps The Last Time – The National Tally Room 2007" (89 pages 7.6MB PDF).
Click to download my "2010 National Tally Room Single Image Proof Book" (13.7 MB PDF).
Click to download my "2010 National Tally Room Panorama Proof Book" (7.4 MB PDF).
