Sydney, this is your life Bruna Trimarchi, centre, Mika Klickovic and Roma Jakubec at the Rebels clubhouse, Leppington. A photographer's 20-year suburban journey has become part of a library revolution. Therese Sweeney has thousands of photographs of the area in south-west Sydney where she grew up. Ask her to choose her favourites and she's spoilt for choice. There are the shots of market gardeners and koi farmers, local walking groups and bocce players, big noisy families celebrating weddings and birthdays, and solitary folk leading quiet, ordinary lives. Sweeney's "photo album" is an intimate chronicle of social change in several suburbs around the Liverpool and Camden municipalities - images she has captured over 20 years and which are now in a ground-breaking, public archive developed by librarians at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). When personal circumstances drew her into this intense project - "on reflection, the journey I had to have" - she recognised she would always be tied to her community. "I grew up in Green Valley from its beginnings - six suburbs full of fibro housing and lots of kids," says Sweeney. She was able to gain access to people's lives because she "was one of them." A favourite theme involved pictures of people at bus stops. One was taken outside the Rebels motorcycle clubhouse. As a busload of women watched, Sweeney captured Austral market gardener Bruna Trimarchi and two friends posing against the club gates. "They're called the 'Rebel Grannies' now," says Sweeney, "and the photograph is framed and hanging in their local community centre." Sweeney started her project in 1994, in the pre-digital era. Working with 35mm film, a second-hand Minolta X300 and a strict budget, she would process the negatives and print her pictures. My shot ratio had to be tight - I allowed myself three shots to come up with a keeper. The next step, in 1995, was starting a communication degree (beginning her enduring association with UTS) to hone the theory side - filmmaking, social history, politics. That brought her into the orbit of Professor Paul Ashton, co-director of the Australian Centre for Public History, who recognised the significance of what Sweeney was doing. "[Her work] documents in fine-grain detail the rapid development of Sydney's south-west in the 1990s and beyond," says Professor Ashton. It's a relatively contemporary period and few have recorded it - certainly not in this voluminous detail. On the one hand, it's domestic and small scale - full of intimate scenes. On the other, Therese's work captures the massive changes that have been wrought in a recent passage of time as the suburbs undergo development of what were spaces for agriculture and horticulture. Professor Ashton could see the potential of Sweeney's archive as a public resource, which brought UTS Librarian Mal Booth into the frame. "When we talk about libraries it's less about building collections and putting them on shelves or making databases and making people come and find you," says Booth. It's now more about building unique collections - and Therese's is a unique collection - and sharing it. The dilemma for the archivist, he says, is deciding when material which some might call ephemera is worth collecting. That's the hard decision to make ... is [an item] important or is it ephemeral? UTS Library staff digitised Sweeney's selected negatives and transparencies and developed the metadata framework, adding context - author, titles and places, for example - to expose each item to search engines and other lines of online inquiry. The bigger picture is the narrative of Sweeney's Memory Bank project, recording the stories of pioneering migrant market gardeners and residents forming new suburbs from the early 1960s. The same team has recently published Conflicted Dispatches, an archive of writings by Indian journalist PRS Mani, who was an officer in the British army in Indonesia from 1945 to 1949. The archive was edited by Professor Heather Goodall of UTS. Booth says the benefits of collecting Sweeney's photographs may not be revealed for years, ..." when someone desperate for evidence - cultural material in an exhibition, in a book - goes 'this is just gold', combines it with some other knowledge, or data sets, and makes something else of it." Sweeney is pleased UTS has made her collection public. It's what I wanted from the beginning. My purpose - apart from recording working-class culture - was to stimulate curiosity and research. The project is multi-layered: some 1000-plus still photographs are the first phase, to be followed by sound and, finally, video. Photography was never enough for me to honour the residents ... which led to the oral history and the moving images. Sweeney says in some ways it was a harsh landscape in which to grow up. However, it also had a rich mixture of people - from the home owners to those dependent on welfare - who looked after one another. "What's mine is yours," says Sweeney. That's how we got by. See the full archive at sweeney.lib.uts.edu.au. The PRS Mani archive is at http://hdl.handle.net/10453/28084. For more about Therese Sweeney's work, see memorybank.org.au.