The communist who raised me: photographer Ruth Maddison interrogates her father's Asio file

From an early age, Ruth Maddison knew her father, Sam Goldbloom, was being watched. “He used to tell us not to worry about the men sitting in the car in front of the house … we were aware the clicks on the phone meant ‘they’ were listening too,” the award-winning Melbourne-born photographer says.

“They” were the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. In the 1940s, Goldbloom’s anti-fascist ideals drew Asio’s attention. He later joined the Communist party before becoming a major player in the World Peace Council. These associations made him a person of interest for more than 30 years.

While the spy agency’s prolonged surveillance of her father was not news, Maddison says that when her mother, Rosa, died in 2008, she discovered a much more layered history. As she and her two sisters packed up the family home, Maddison was tasked with clearing out her father’s shed. He had died in 1999 but until then no one had gone through “Sam’s stuff”.

There she found packs of slides, video footage from Goldbloom’s numerous peace missions to communist regimes including the USSR, East Germany and Cuba, as well as home movies, correspondence and other paraphernalia related to his activist work. This discovery became the entry point to The Fellow Traveller, the centrepiece for the first major survey of Maddison’s work, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The survey charts Maddison’s documentary practice from 1976 to the 2000s and opens at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Fitzroy on 26 February.

In the 1950s “fellow traveller” was a derisive term for a communist sympathiser. Maddison uses the term to reflect an imaginary journey with her father. Filling the largest gallery at CCP, The Fellow Traveller features Maddison’s signature hand-coloured, annotated and collaged photographs, artefacts from the Asio files and vitrines with personal memorabilia.

During the research process, Maddison became aware she could access the Asio files on her father. She travelled to the National Archives in Canberra from her home in Eden, New South Wales and pored through piles of Asio papers, photographs and film. Melbourne University Archives also had extensive files on Goldbloom’s political life, and this became another important resource. Her father’s personal papers and her own recollections added to the unfolding narrative.

The deeper Maddison burrowed, the more her father’s life unfolded like a spy novel. Maddison found that Asio had photographed Goldbloom at various protest rallies, marking him by number, not name, on actual prints. In the files there was evidence that members of the public had readily informed on her father, too. During Goldbloom’s many overseas trips on peace missions, airline staff and passengers relayed conversations. Apparently Goldbloom liked to spin a yarn. “He’d tell the person next to him on the plane that he was a lecturer or an importer.” Maddison laughs at the idea that these innocuous fabrications inflamed Asio’s suspicions.

She also discovered reels of surveillance film documenting suspected members of the Communist party as they arrived at a secret meeting in one of Melbourne’s laneways in the 50s. This footage appears in the exhibition as The Dustbins of History, a short film that is comedic in its ambiguity and monotony. All that’s missing is the Keystone Cops.

As she worked, Maddison, who is now 75, reflected on her father’s effect on her own political views. In 1975, at the age of 30, she left her job as Victoria’s first female builder’s labourer and turned to photography. At the time she was hanging with artists at Melbourne’s Pram Factory, where her “pro-union, anti-nuclear views” were welcomed. Since then, Maddison has established a reputation as one of Australia’s foremost social documentary photographers, with her work held in national and state institutions.

She uses her camera to explore the influence of politics on everyday life, often focusing on the personal. In The Fellow Traveller she exposes the social and political climate of the postwar years through a very intimate and at times painful lens.

“For my father, politics was number one,” she says. “To see it all laid out in the Asio files, you know, night after night after night Sam was at meetings, and then this year he’s overseas for one month, and then another year for two months, then three. While I was looking at all of that I realised family wasn’t number one for him.”

While Maddison was not witness to her father’s interactions with world leaders, she imagined him meeting men like Mao and Khrushchev. In a series, “Last night I had the strangest dream” Maddison has inserted Goldbloom into pictures with his political heroes.

“It’s not about reinterpreting history, I am playing with him and his life, and wondering if he ever daydreamed these images like I am now.” These hand-coloured photographs are also visual evidence of the fiction Asio pursued.

Maddison describes her treatment of the archival materials as “part real, part desire and part imaginary”, which parallels the narrative in the Asio files. In the endless reams of observational notes, innocuous photographs and informers’ statements lies the hope that Goldbloom was up to something.

After decades of being denigrated in the press and parliament, in 1990 Goldbloom was awarded an OAM for his service as an activist for peace. Later, a street was named after him in Canberra. Maddison has paired an Asio image of her father at a peace rally in 1965 with the Goldbloom street sign, evidence she says of “history doing the wheel again”.

• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times by Ruth Maddison, part of Photo2021, is showing at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, from 26 February