Works of art of the Melocco brothers present in the new book
Most young people are said to look up. Not Victoria Hynes, whose mosaic floors of the late grandfather Peter Melocco once decorated hundreds of public buildings in Sydney.
As a child, Hynes was walked in Sydney’s CBD to see Peter’s work and his brothers, Antonio and Galliano, known as the Melocco brothers. It was everywhere, he said, from “the splendor similar to Hogwarts” of the State Theater to banks, Dymock and great department stores.
“Look at the bottom,” said his mother when they visited the crypt of the cathedral of St Mary and the Mitchell vestibule of the state library to see one of the treasures of the library, the Tasman map created in mosaic.
Zeny Edwards, author of a new book on Meloccos, said that the contribution of the Italian brothers to the country’s cultural and architectural heritage, like that of many migrants, was seriously neglected.
They had a high architecture in art. Edwards described it as “painting in stone”, which is the title of the book.
Sitting on a bench with Hynes overlooking the mosaic of the library representing Abel Tasman’s travels in 1642 and 1644, Edwards said it was “an extraordinary and complete work of art”.
Often called the map of Bonaparte, the 4 meters of Tasman’s mural for 5.5 meters were made of marble and Australian terrace. It is equipped with knots, whales, monsters, pink cherubs and rolled waves bordered in brass.
Melocco’s mural in the central station was restored after it was damaged by a fire in 2015. Credit: Dean Sewell
A historian of architecture that also wrote a biography of Sir John Sulman, Edwards said that the work of the Meloccos was incorporated into the architecture of Australia – painted in “Mosaic, terrace, scarcked, throwing it”.
It is an ancient art that is extinguishing. “It’s too expensive. It was handmade by hundreds of people who lay every stone for the stone,” he said.
Meloccos’s team completed the mosaic of the state library in 18 months during the first years of the Second World War.
The historian Zeny Edwards (left) wrote a book on the mosaics of the Melocco brothers, including this example in the state library of the new South Wales. Credit: Janie Barrett
According to Edwards’s research, some of their Italian workers have been considered enemies and returned to the internship fields after completion of the work.
Hynes’s grandfather was also interned, just to be released after the intervention of the best politicians of the day, Kim Beazley Snr and Arthur Calwell.
The art of melocco was everywhere. Yet Edwards and Hynes said that the recognition of the brothers’ contribution was “seriously lacking”.
Edwards writes that Meloccos’s work is everywhere in Sydney’s CBD. Most Sydneysiders had walked on the mosaic terrace floor while buying a ticket to the Central Station, Edwards said. It was in the marble of David Jones and the old department store of Mark Foys and the chopped columns of the Old Commonwealth Bank (now home to the Macquarie Group) to Martin Place.
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Hynes said that his grandfather came to Australia in 1908 with only 10 scellini, later bringing his brothers from the Italian village of Toppo in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.
Painting with stone, the story of the Melocco brothersZeny Edwards will be published by Longueville Media and launched by the architect Penelope Seidler in early April.
