Down memory plain: pioneering Melbourne tabloid that highlighted the everyday goes digital

Paul Dee of the State Library Victoria with the Sun News-Pictorial, which is to have three decades of its pages digitised there. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

On 4 December 1925 a woman getting her hair cut by a “shingling expert” at a fete in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs appeared on the front page of Australia’s highest-selling daily newspaper.

“That’s it, there’s no story,” says Paul Dee, a senior librarian at the State Library Victoria, who adds that it’s a classic example of what the Sun News-Pictorial offered readers: “an unfamous person doing an unfamous thing in an unfamous place.”