Ernest Robinson Hillier isn’t credited in our urban histories. He arrives, leads a movement and disappears. It was Bob actually who first stood (metaphorically) before the bulldozer to save our inner-city heritage and clear out the cockroaches, rats and poets. As Bob stoutly said in Let’s Buy a Terrace (1968), slums made perfect homes for ‘modern people with taste’.
Son of the chocolatier Ernest Hillier and old boy of Cranbrook, Bob is probably best known as a society photographer. I’m being polite. Nobody has heard of our official Miss Australia photographer, or his patriotic wartime operations producing ‘Rude Nudes’ from his studio in George St, Sydney for the soldiers. We can tell Bob was a Creative. All his photographs in Let’s Buy a Terrace are in black and white.
John Tranter’s irksome lines ‘my room / gets on my nerves, with its endless books’ (‘At the Criterion’) points to the scientific problem of books for Modern People with Taste. Bob argued that large format architecture books were a useful prop that could be arranged on tables with insouciant effect. Science disagreed. The space / time continuum wasn’t a theory. One cubic metre of precious terrace space was lost for every hour spent reading a book.
You might think it a pity that black-and-white pics don’t capture the Mediterranean light blues, pinks and mauves of the old terraces painted by Greek and Italian immigrants in the 1950s, cream-washed out of history. If so, you’re a trouble maker and please stop reading this now. As Bob probably said, ‘If you want Mediterranean plant a lemon tree. Ecco. Your own slice of Tuscany in Paddo.’
Colour was a serious problem for Modern People with Taste. Bob was fond of cream facades, although whether he trimmed with dark green is unknown. We know Bob’s mentor Robin Boyd detested the heritage couplet, as he tells us at great length in The Australian Ugliness, essential reading for Modern People with Taste. Boyd was tortured by colour. He seethed at pink electric mixers and two-tone cars. The vibrations from red, blue and yellow plastic salt and pepper shakers ‘beneath the economical brilliance of the fluorescent light’ were agony. Put Boyd to bed. Please.
Colin Talbot is tonic after Boyd. Like all Rock n Roll loving Melbournians Colin came from Adelaide. True to his inner-city clan, Colin resented the new terrace owners invading his gaff and romping about with Afghan Hounds before Border Collies were invented. You can read him yourself in Colin Talbot’s Greatest Hits (1977), published by Sydney academic and faction writer Michael Wilding of Wild & Woolly. It’s chockers with rock stars, pornographers and perverts. These truly were the best of times.
Young Collin started Outback Press with his mates in the early 1970s, publishing from a condemned terrace in Fitzroy, and freelancing as a rock journalist writing about his friends. ‘The house was dirty. The walls were painted black and hung with torn posters. They were living in this dump and finding it “groovy”, having come from easy middle class backgrounds.’ (Vicki Viidikas Wrappings)
Colin is probably best known as an Australian practitioner of the American style of New Journalism, which borrowed heavily from French Cinéma vérité. I say probably because nobody under the age of 80 has heard of him. Colin is the central character in all his articles. He writes typically in ‘real’ time present tense, his eye the handheld camera on tour with Sky Hooks post gig in the motel room focused on the drunken ‘Adelaide Band mole’ talking on and on about ‘no longer giving head’, nobody listening, feels like an experimental doco. It takes you there. He’s good.
He was also editing and writing for the counterculture rag Digger, the same outfit which produced the very well-known Helen Garner. Helen too was living in a rented inner Melbourne terrace, scribbling herself and her friends into Monkey Grip (1977), while ad-libbing the speed freak in True Shit, a mash of Cinéma vérité and beloved Australian zany. It was Colin who suggested she insert a love story into the vérité as hook. It worked a treat. The urban historians loved it. Renate Howe at Deakin University jumped on Monkey Grip in 1978, turning it into course material on the new way Modern Anarchists with Taste were living in slums.
You can decide whether Colin was a leading influence on Melbourne Faction. My concern is with the vérité of Colin’s work on the terrace. I don’t trust his observation ‘you can tell a renovated one easily because it has no walls inside’. The wunderkind designers were yet to remove the guts. Bob and his movement weren’t responsible for sledge hammered 70s style archways and lonely sections of load bearing walls.
My investigations follow Colin up to a Balmain reading which include Mr Frank Moorhouse, Dr Michael Wilding, Nigel Roberts, Kate Jennings and Robert Adamson. Colin disappears. He emerges a decade later at the first Melbourne Spoleto Festival inspired by the Theatre of Cruelty with the brilliant concept of planting poets on trams and forcing the captive commuters to listen to them. But I’m leaping wildly ahead.
In 1977 the leader of the Balmain School of Faction Mr Frank Moorhouse had just published his new collection Tales of Mystery and Romance. Some of the characters recognised themselves and took offence, which is odd. The very purpose of faction after all is to write your mates into fiction, easily identifiable to them and the coterie. It makes the group feel special.
Mr Moorhouse is an angel to me. He reveals the vérité when the Frank protagonist in pursuit of the Michael Wilding antagonist stumbles into a hostile Balmain commune:
I moved into the other room. It was not so much that I moved, more that the unreceptivity poked me out through a huge circular hole into yet another even darker room. They had knocked this huge circular hole in the wall leaving rubble. I sat down on a lopsided bean bag chair keeping one of my legs outrigged so I wouldn’t fall over. The beans always move away from me. A pig squealed out from somewhere in the chair. A pig from under me.
If you wish to purchase Mystery and Romance it comes with the trigger warning: Not to be Read by Modern People with Taste.