From an old photo album

Have you looked through your old family photo albums recently? This photo is from the Roberts family collection, now in the hands of the State Library of Victoria. It shows people on a Ballarat tram in December 1905, only four months after the electric trams started operating. The picture was taken by J. G. Roberts, who worked for the Melbourne cable car company. Melbourne didn’t get electric trams until 1906.

John Garibaldi Roberts was born at Italian Gully, Vic. in 1860. He attended school in Scarsdale and Cape Clear and moved to Ballarat in 1877. In 1885, he joined the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company, was appointed manager of the cable system at the Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board in 1920, and retired in 1923. An avid reader, book collector and theatregoer, he entertained literary and artistic friends at his weekend retreat in Kallista, Vic. He died in 1933.