Faces Replaced, Stories Erased: Melbourne Communities Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement

Posters go up. Faces appear. Then, without explanation, those faces are replaced with different ones — often whiter, often younger, sometimes entirely disconnected from the community the material was meant to serve. Duplicate image replacement, the practice of swapping out photographs in public-facing documents, council communications, and community health materials when stock libraries are updated or design contracts change hands, has become a quiet flashpoint across Melbourne's western and inner-northern suburbs.

The issue landed in sharper focus this week after several community organisations in Footscray and Flemington reported that updated versions of Victorian Department of Health multilingual resource kits — distributed to local health services in June 2026 — had replaced photographs of visibly South Sudanese and Vietnamese families with generic stock imagery. The original photos had been commissioned specifically for those communities through a 2023 co-design process.

What Gets Lost When Images Get Swapped

For community workers at organisations including the Flemington Community Centre on Racecourse Road and the Western Bulldogs Community Foundation, which operates programs across Braybrook and Sunshine, the concern is practical as well as symbolic. Health and civic materials that feature recognisable faces from a specific community consistently outperform generic imagery in engagement and trust, according to published guidance from VicHealth's Health Literacy program, which has documented the issue in its co-design frameworks since at least 2021.

Community members in Footscray's Hopkins Street precinct described noticing the change almost immediately. A health promotion flyer for a maternal and child health service that had prominently featured a Somali-Australian mother and her infant — an image community members said they had seen produced locally — was reprinted with a stock photo of an ambiguously ethnic woman that several residents said felt "borrowed from anywhere." No community input was sought before the swap was made, according to accounts from workers at two separate organisations in the area, though The Daily Melbourne was unable to independently verify the internal decision-making process at the department.

Multicultural community advocates say the pattern is not new, but the pace has accelerated as government agencies increasingly centralise their design and communications procurement. Victoria's whole-of-government Digital and Communications policy, updated in March 2025, consolidates creative asset management under fewer vendors — a change that streamlined costs but, critics argue, reduced accountability for culturally specific imagery choices.

The Deeper Problem With 'Default' Visual Language

The Refugee Health Program at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which publishes patient-facing materials in more than 30 languages, maintains a separate internal photo library built from community-consented portrait sessions conducted between 2019 and 2023. Staff there say protecting that library from automatic replacement during system migrations has required manual intervention every time a new content management system is rolled out — most recently during a platform transition in late 2025.

Research published in the Australian Journal of Primary Health in 2022 found that culturally concordant imagery in health communications increased material engagement among CALD communities by measurable margins in pilot studies conducted in Melbourne's western suburbs, though the study's authors noted the evidence base remains limited and further longitudinal work is needed.

The cost of commissioning culturally specific photography is frequently cited as the reason agencies default to stock. A single half-day community portrait session in Melbourne typically runs between $2,000 and $4,500, depending on the photographer and location — a line item that is easy to cut when budgets tighten.

For communities in suburbs like Sunshine, Heidelberg West, and Dandenong, where multiple rounds of health and social services materials have been produced and then quietly revised over the past decade, the cumulative effect is one of institutional carelessness rather than malice. Community workers say the fix is straightforward: agencies should be required to document the origin of images used in publicly funded materials and flag replacements for community sign-off before reprinting. Some councils, including Maribyrnong City Council, have begun trialling image provenance registers for community grant-funded materials — a model advocates say the state government should examine before the next round of multilingual resource kits goes to print, expected before the end of the 2026 calendar year.