Mal says that I picked up the basics very quickly. He says that kids like me are a real challenge and that we raise the bar. I was inquisitive, inquiring and challenging – basically a pain in the arse! While he was teaching, he would look for that flicker of disinterest in my eyes and know he would have to expand his projects and ideas.
We covered a lot of theory, but the practice was very important too. There was a darkroom attached to the classroom, so we covered developing and printing. I was very interested in the chemistry aspect of photography, and that certainly helped with the course. Mal reflects that if you can get a kid interested in the darkroom process, it’s amazing what they can achieve. East Tech had an old Pentax K1000 that pupils could borrow at weekends, though you had to go through a major process to get it. It was the first proper camera I ever used. I was thirteen.
Mal also operated field trips for the students, generally just around town during daylight hours. We worked on cityscapes, portraiture, the full range. We were limited in terms of film stock and studio time, but this probably helped me become a better photographer. I knew how to make a shot work, and I also knew that I couldn’t waste frames.
By Year 10 I was integrating photography with other subjects. For one science project I went up to Kodak’s facility in Melbourne and learned about the history of photography, how film was made with silver oxide, the whole thing. I put everything into that project. (Until he retired in 2005, Mal used my work on that project as a teaching aid.)
The school built a new music and art wing and I volunteered to be the photographer for the opening ceremony. Mal was also responsible for the school magazine and was always looking for content, so was happy to give the job to me. My involvement in the magazine also meant that he could allocate more studio time for me.
The Geelong News, one of our local papers, came down to shoot some images of the opening ceremony, too, and the following week in class we went through the spread that had run in the paper. Mal talked through the photographer’s approach and where it might have been better, and remembers me immediately challenging him and defending the photographer.
Initially my parents thought that my photography was just a hobby. They got nervous when it became obvious that it was my chosen vocation. I took a job at Coles New World supermarket, working alongside my best friend Mario, and soon bought my first car and more importantly my first camera – which in turn made me my first million.
My first bit of kit was a Ricoh XR2S from Fletchers in Melbourne. It had all the amazing features I wanted. I remember walking in there with Dad, who said, ‘There are a lot of cameras here. Are you sure this is the one you want?’ He couldn’t believe I knew what I wanted. I used to walk around the house and the garden taking pictures of everything – especially Sasha, the family dog.
During years 10 and 11 at East Tech I got my first taste of life on a newspaper when I was sent on a work experience secondment to the Geelong Advertiser. My first printed picture, of three boys at a local fete, was used big and I was as pleased as punch. The Addy placement was over all too quickly, but I was soon back there working for free during my school holidays.
When I wasn’t partying I was practising my photography, but it was all in my spare time – I wasn’t even studying it at the Gordon Institute of Technology (where I went to do my final year of school). At sixteen, I started doing voluntary work experience. My mother almost had a fit when I came home from my first unpaid photographic job with pics of a decapitation on a railway line. A purple Jaguar had got stuck on the tracks and been decimated by the 3.15. This was real news. I thought my photos were unbelievable and threw the prints down on the table for her to look at while she was cooking dinner. She was speechless for a moment. Eventually she said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be an architect, son?’ I’ll never forget the look on her face. You don’t really register the bad stuff when you’re in a high-octane news situation. You get tunnel vision and just focus on doing the job.
As my photographic career took off, my formal education started to fall away. I had decided that I couldn’t do both well, but it was an easy choice. During one of the infrequent lessons I actually attended, I looked at the algebra on the board and thought, ‘I am never going to use this in my life.’ And that was that. Predictably, I flunked at the Gordon.
Despite the fact that I had completed work placements at The Addy, I knew there was no space there and no chance of a job, so I targeted the other major paper in town, the Geelong News. I had been wagging school a lot and covering shifts for Brian ‘Harry’ Hamilton at The News, as well as doing whatever scraps they threw me.
I stuck with it, kept grafting and, over time, did more and more for The News, mostly unofficially. The News was biweekly and The Addy was daily. That in itself taught me to be more creative and take a different approach. If I was somewhere at the same time as an Addy photographer, I couldn’t shoot identical pictures as his would usually be published before mine and I didn’t want to be seen to be regurgitating the same material as my rivals. We loved getting exclusives at The News, turning The Addy over. A biweekly should never really be able to do it, but we managed to all the time. We’d all socialise in the Press Bar in the Criterion Hotel after work, but I always wanted to win.
I ended up getting banned from The News because, as an unpaid member of staff, I wasn’t covered by the workers’ compensation insurance scheme. I was very upset about that. The editor, Dale Jennings, was a real by-the-book man and we weren’t close, so the situation seemed impossible. I was much more friendly with his deputy, Gary O’Regan, and the sports editor, Ondrej Foltin. When Jennings moved to The Addy and O’Regan became editor my career began to flourish.
Harry Hamilton was on his way out, and I focused on making sure I was there, front and square, to step into his boots. O’Regan soon found out that I had been moonlighting and, according to Ondrej, far from holding it against me, when Harry left to set up a new company, I got my first break. O’Regan took me on rather than hiring an experienced hand.
I was ecstatic: at eighteen I was an official First Year Cadet with a weekly pay packet of $23. I signed up for as much as I could, regularly covering twenty or more jobs a day. If there was nothing in the job diary I would go out and set up my own stuff. It was never about the money – it was all about the idea. I was a real experimenter. My goal was to get the front and back pages every day. I achieved it many times over.
When Glen ‘Quarters’ Quartermain joined The News he became my right-hand journalistic buddy. He’s a great writer and one of the funniest characters I’ve ever met – a classic. Glen says that I am the most competitive little bastard he’s ever met and that I annoy him at times. This has been a constant in our friendship; we often fall out for a couple of weeks before carrying on as before, but I count him among my closest friends.
We were quite a team and some of the stories we covered together were unbelievable. One of our first jobs was to cover a horse race and instead of remaining behind the barriers, I clambered onto the track about five metres behind the finishing line. The officials were screaming at Glen to get me out of the way, but he knew that I wouldn’t listen to him any more than I was listening to them. They thought I was going to be killed, and I nearly was. As the horses finished they actually bowled me over, but I got a great shot of the winner on a 24 mm lens.
I was also there to help Glen cover his first fatal car accident, which is always a gruelling experience for any reporter. Glen kept his distance, but I was shooting through the car window, even though the macabre shots were obviously never going to be used in a family newspaper. I turned to see Quarters throwing up over a farm fence, entertaining the local cow population.
At