Commonwealth cinematographer Bert Ive in studio holding a lens component next to a Debrie camera.

Bert Ive was not a name that I knew much about until I worked on a project on the history of Film Australia in the early 1980s. Working with me was the highly knowledgeable Film Australia historian Judy Adamson, and to help the two of us flesh out the early history of government filmmaking, Judy had access to Bert Ive’s scrapbook and his work diary. The scrapbook was crammed with information about every aspect of Ive’s film career from 1906 until the time of his death in 1939. It is substantially from that source, now held by the NFSA, that I have drawn the following information about his life.

Albert Sewell (‘Bert’) Ive was born in Reading, Berkshire, England, in 1875, to William and Ellen Ive, and was introduced to cameras and photography as a child. At the age of 11, he and his family moved to Australia, where they settled in Brisbane. Leaving school at 13, Bert Ive trained as an artist before working as a glass embosser, sign-writer, decorator and painter. He was on stage as a live entertainer in 1896, and the next year was entranced by his first viewing of film. He became a travelling film exhibitor through south Queensland and northern New South Wales, and by 1906 was projecting films and song slides for Ted Holland’s Vaudeville Entertainers in Brisbane. In 1909 he shot his first actuality film, after which he alternated actuality and feature film camerawork with film exhibition. In May 1913 he was appointed the Commonwealth government’s cinematographer and still photographer.

This position had previously been held, from December 1911 to May 1913, by James Pinkerton Campbell, but for reasons including personality clashes, arguments over quality and the under-resourcing of Campbell’s work, this appointment had not been a success. By contrast, from the moment Bert Ive commenced in the role, he was encouraged to set up what would eventually be known as the Cinema and Photographic Branch. His first months in the job involved establishing a Melbourne workspace and buying equipment, and in March 1914 the Brisbane Star newspaper reported that he had ‘spent six months travelling around the States taking living pictures of anything of interest’. Other newspaper reports described Ive as ‘an enthusiast’, ‘a man of infinite resource’ and ‘of a happy nature’, and these qualities, along with the promotional nature of much of his work, usually guaranteed him a ready welcome wherever he travelled.