‘It’s a job’: Lindsay Cox and the work that never stops
The Salvation Army has served the Melbourne CBD from a hilltop building on Bourke Street since 1895. But above the hustle of Project 614 is a fascinating slice of history with an unstoppable curator to match. Salvos Online journalist KIRRALEE NICOLLE went on a tour of The Salvation Army Museum with Manager Lindsay Cox.
Lindsay Cox OAM has been The Salvation Army Australia Museum Manager for 30 years as of August 2024, and in 2021 was given an Order of Australia Medal for his service to community history. But his first encounter with The Salvation Army was due to a different kind of devotion.
As a 15-year-old, Lindsay was nervous.
“There was a girl in third form at high school that I really wanted to talk to and take out, and I couldn’t talk to [her] in front of my mates.”
Lindsay says he then found out she attended something called The Salvation Army Youth Group.
“I found out where the youth group was, and I went [along]. She didn’t turn up. I said, ‘I’ll have to go back again’.
“She never came back. And I’m still here.”
As he says this, Lindsay is sitting in his museum office, positively swamped by Salvation Army memorabilia. There are books he has written on TSA history, his cartoons, which have featured heavily in Salvation Army publications over the decades, a plaque at the front of his desk that says ‘Territorial Commander’ and more small pieces of historical value than I can count.
By all obvious signs, Lindsay got past his teenage crush. He’s now been married to wife Dr Helen Cox, an academic who has also studied welfare within the history of The Salvation Army, for 49 years. They have three children and one grandchild.
But he isn’t over The Salvation Army or its varied and transformative history. Lindsay, now 82, leads me up staircases and under low-hanging beams, showing me the archives room and Limelight Studio at the top of 69 Bourke Street, where this year The Salvation Army will mark 130 years as building owners.
In the 1890s, soon after The Salvation Army bought the building from the YMCA, Salvation Army officers would assemble at 69 Bourke Street to spend their evenings wandering Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale Streets, patrolling opium dens and brothels.
On these lower levels, the dynamic Majors Brendan and Sandra Nottle now run the ever-growing Project 614, a corps, social mission outreach centre, Magpie Nest Café and now a subsidised medical care centre.
Since August 1994, Lindsay has run a small but dedicated museum team, which now includes Assistant Manager Barry Gittins, also a journalist and prolific writer on Salvation Army history, and volunteer researcher and librarian Dot, who has served the museum for almost 15 years. Interstate, Assistant Manager Don Callaghan runs the Sydney branch of the Museum. Outside this work, Lindsay is a senior soldier and bandsman, having played trombone, cornet and now bass drum at Merri-Bek Salvation Army.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got a bit of asthma today,” Lindsay says by way of apology for his slightly out-of-breath demeanour. At 30 years old, I’m struggling to keep up with both his rapid mind and the pace of his body as we weave through the building.
As we reach the top of a staircase, I think to mention that he began his role here a month before I was born. I’m wondering how he might take it – I’m hoping in good faith. But, in a twist of irony, it comes out a little hoarse as I’m now out of breath. He pauses, nods and laughs.
“That’d be right,” he says.
The archives room is a treasure trove of not just Salvation Army history but Australian colonial history as well. I flick through a Victory annual publication from May 1921 to find, among articles from ministries across the world, one about a Salvation Army ministry centre for women in Tasmania.
The article ends with this:
"It would take many books to fully recount all its work of mercy during that time, but needless to say, they will never be written, if only for the reason that most of the stories must never be told.”
The archives room at the museum must contain many such records of mercy. With ledgers, folders and boxes of memorabilia from corps and Salvationists across the country, it is orderly, touchable and expansive.
Down the stairs again and through a side door, the Limelight Department – Australia’s first feature film studio and one of the first in the world – is every bit as creaky, as shadowy, as truly strange and uncanny as you can imagine a studio that operated from 1898 to 1910 to be. It feels a bit like standing in the hull of an old ship, but you can hear the guttural sounds of pigeons nesting on the roof outside and the traffic and voices of Bourke Street passing below. The soft blue-grey paint has been matched to the original lead-based paint, which now appears just on a small patch above the Colouring Room door, lettering unchanged. Lindsay has recently rebuilt and painted the original workbench inside this room and is now collecting items to replicate the slide colouring materials.
“I was surprised that I felt myself growing emotional in this space ...”
Across the dim space, you can see where corners and rooms were purposely kept dark to work with light-sensitive chemicals and where there was more room to operate large, unwieldy camera equipment that filmed in 90-second increments. In the case of the Limelight Department’s first feature film, Soldiers of the Cross, these short bursts of film were interspersed with meticulously colourised slides displayed on a Magic Lantern, a large and heavy projector unit, to create a bold narrative of Roman Christian martyrdom meant to inspire young Australians toward evangelism.
Many of these slides have now been recognised on the UNESCO World Heritage List register. A recent documentary, Limelight, which tells the story of the Limelight Department, is soon to air on SBS and be circulated in cinemas across Australia.
I ask Lindsay what it means to him to have such recognition for the slides he curates so carefully.
“Storm in a teacup,” he quips. “Perhaps it helps to convince my boss that I do do something sometimes.”
I was surprised that I felt myself growing emotional in this space as I pondered the toil and spirit that drove these early ‘media missionaries’ – my words – to do their work with such dangerous and bulky equipment. The studio produced about 300 films in its short tenure before Commissioner James Hay [Territorial Commander from 1909 to 1921] put it to a stop with the declaration that ‘the cinema, as conducted by The Salvation Army, had led to weakness and a lightness incompatible with true Salvationism’.
This building – its creaky floors, its ghosts of a time when The Salvation Army produced hundreds of film reels which ranged from the Federation of Australia to imagery of beheadings that reportedly left women ‘fainting in the aisles’, as Lindsay tells me – communicates a different story. It’s a coloured and complex one, but the work happening on the lower levels and the history documented above – both are still alive and well. It seems those 300-odd films did little to stem the passion within The Salvation Army, after all.
But I can’t get too ahead of myself. When I ask Lindsay why he believes it’s important to talk about and showcase Salvation Army history, his reply is brief, his grin mischievous.
“Well, it’s a job,” he says.
