MY BRILLIANT CAREER

 My Brilliant Career

I grew up by a river, a big and very beautiful river. I wrote an ode to it in later years…

”Light rolling, rippling river of light, your waters washed us in our youth, that baptism now reveals a truth. To June and Lou whose time was not in vain, that constant fall of steady rain has cleansed us of all time-worn pain, and now that ripple has become a flop a loving source of life and blood…… 

I literally lived for the river, leapt about crazily on it’s smooth round rocks in the heat of summer and swam in it’s dark and mysterious depths. Diving down into pools and wondering at the flow and beauty and depth. I “knew” it so well on an elemental level and its light rippling waters in the rapids.

My mother had suggested to my father in the early 1950’s that with a growing family why wouldn’t they move out to her Paternal Grandfather’s house in Upper Hutt. It was on several acres of land and a grand old estate known as “Gatehouse”. I was eternally grateful to her for that call and in later years I thanked her profusely for having the courage wit to see it was a good move out of Wellington.

I was an “afterthought” child and though she loved me, she was distressed at yet another “in the family” when I came along. June was an only child, so how had she come to have five! Anyway I spent my first 12 years at that place by the big river and absolutely adored it. I was not an easy boy and when it came time to move on I found it difficult to be uplifted from my childhood “Nivarna” and placed in one of the premier NZ colleges for boys….Wanganui Collegiate. I didn’t fit in this place from the start and I didn’t do my best to fit there either. The more they tried to accomodate me the more I dug my heels in. I was like a bloody donkey pulling the other way. 

Eventually Mum and Dad gave in and let me move to Auckland where they had re-located. They hunted around and I recall they turned down the opportunity of buy an old sea captains house in Torpedo Bay Devonport. I remember this place well because it had magnificent stained glass windows and an “artists studio”. It seems the most romantic residence. But it did face south and was right next to a fairly fundamental Naval Establishment.

Dante Merlin du Machiavelli was a photographer I worked with in Auckland. He worked for NZ Truth. Sometimes if we had nasty “crims” to capture we would work together to lessen the chance of a confrontation.

I had a fairly unremarkable career as a News Photographer. Sure there was the time I captured Woman’s liberationist Germain Greer as she said the word “Bullshit” during a speech in Auckland in the mid 1970’s. 

It was one of the few times I can say editors saw and made use of a picture to good effect. It was such a ridiculous contention that people could actually break the law with such utterances.

One of my big failings as a Newspaper photographer was that I had opinions about photographs. In truth I edited “in the camera” as I saw it, whatever was happening at the time. So often when I returned to the office and the cry went out “what else you got?” My answer was “nothin”! I had already presented them with my visual interpretation of what had happened and saw no value in them going over more material to re-make the event in their way whatever it may have been. 

Germain comes out with the “bullshit line”.

Photographers were not meant to have “opinions” at all. That was the province of journalists and editors, sub editors when you worked in newspapers. This high-handed attitude was held by most journos but the really clever ones also knew that photographers had “seeing knowledge”. Good photographers “saw” and noted things before them in acutely different ways to those who gathered and concentrated in “words”.

That year I also caught a snap of Mick Jagger arriving at Auckland International airport. I used Ilford FP4 film. It had beautiful tonality and in the picture you can see Mick had a packet of Australian Tally Ho Rolling papers in his pocket no doubt for rolling the odd marijuana joint. 

Working with a good journo was a very interesting and intimate relationship and being thrown together in the act of interpreting an event or person was often intense. 

But I loved the “random” nature of my work. In those far off pre-mobile phone days we used “beepers”. I recall one day fishing in my canoe just off Darling point in Sydney harbour. It was the most gorgeous day but when my beeper went off I had no hesitation in making for shore and calling the office. It always meant a days work. As a freelance without all the “entitlements” of staff work but also without the obligations we were better paid on a daily rate.

I had an ingrained dislike of media manipulation and public relations agents and agents in general especially the ungracious way it was generally conducted in Australia in those days.

You never knew just what the assignment might be, who you might meet, where you might be asked to go which was a really extraordinary way to live. I don’t think there are any jobs like that these days. One day I was sent to photograph a Porn Film director, it was a woman. She was very clever and intelligent and she said to me, “You have the most extraordinary job in the world and you don’t really know it!” It was true. I had never considered it. But from that day on I never forgot what she said and I was incredibly grateful to have that work.

 

During my time in Newspapers I met plenty of “celebrities”. Many were totally vacuous pretenders and about 10% or less were really great people.  I met nnd I bludged a fag off David Bowie one night in Sydney. He was a thoroughly gracious man. He smoked Marlboro! And he conducted himself with humility and style. A true renaissance man. 

I never sought a permanent job as a staff photographer. I didn’t like the sense of being “owned”.

I worked as a “casual” or freelance news photographer from the early 1980’s to mid 1998. When I first walked into Murdoch’s photo department in Sydney I could barely believe my eyes. I had come from the quite serious and self-important Bulletin Magazine and I walked into almost total anarchy doing shifts for The Mirror, The Telegraph and The Australian. The strength of character and humour of newspaper people in those days was intoxicating. It wasn’t just that the work was exciting and interesting-so were the people who did the work. Everyday of my life was like walking onto a Fellini set.

The work wasn’t challenging in a technical sense but there was a high level of darkroom skill displayed by many photographers and of course ethical considerations often gave way to “pleasing the editor.” One photographer produced a stunning shot of the first skylab rocket above the Sydney skyline, complete with Harbour bridge, Opera house  etc. It ran front page and was wired and used around the world. The only problem was the “Skylab” was a complete darkroom creation….

Work often took a back seat when the larrikin element took hold. Two blokes kept black and white Rupert Murdoch masks. Cut out from photographs with rubber bands to hold them to the ears. One day when Murdoch was in town making big decisions and TV media crews were camped outside the Holt st office, they both grabbed briefcases, stuck on their “Rupert” masks and dashed from the building. The TV crews, being fooled momentarily fooled, rushed for the cameras. On return to the department another practical joker posing as a photo editor informed them to report to Murdoch’s office. When Rupert finally confronted them he asked them what they were there for and they spilled the beans. He apparently thought it was great joke too. 

I worked for some years at Fairfax with the Sun Herald and The Sydney Morning Herald but it was never as colourful or entertaining as those early years at News Ltd.The Herald people took themselves more seriously and gradually I realised there were less and less inducements to be there.  

Photo-editors were becoming disempowered as journalists wrestled control out of their hands and Newspapers themselves were attempting compete with Television. My belief is that the still image should never try to compete with the moving dialogue. 

I sought work in other areas, lifestyle magazines, corporate and News Agencies like Agence France-Presse who were superb to work for and I learnt a lot. I loved that whole period of my life from my first Newspaper job which I took after leaving a job in NZ as an advertising photographer until I walked out the Fairfax door. I love the way, in the early days how the whole building actually shook when they fired up the presses, I loved the colourful people, smell and and earthiness of the old business and it’s urgency. There was a madness and a connectedness in Newspapers in those days. You were connected with the highest rungs of society right down to “salt of the earth” workers and total dregs. 

Paul Keating who was without comparison as a commentator on Australian Life said “The Australian Media is a Jurassic institution that had failed to come to terms with the requirements for accountability and transparency and that it operates behind a cloak of secrecy and insider knowledge riddled with nepotism, back-scratching and interlocking interests in a way that would bring snorts of admiration from members of the Melbourne club in the 1960’s. He was right.

In 1999 I was contacted one day by the London Daily Telegraph who I done a little work for and asked to shoot some pictures of Kel Hutchence whose son Michael had recently died in a Double Bay hotel. A week later Hello Magazine called to ask if they could use the pics. I told them that I had shot them for The Telegraph. “First Use” only they replied. “What’s that?” said I. And so began a completely new era of my career.

I went from freelance newspaper photographer to working for one of the last big circulation, big budget, magazines in the world. I can’t tell you how nice it was to work for British publications especially Hello.

For a start they paid the subjects of their stories big money so when you arrived to shoot these people, usually big name celebrities you were welcomed with open arms. I covered Sydney and the Sth Pacific for them. I billed them $AU1500.00 per day plus expenses but on one of my trips to Fiji I talked to the subject Anna Walker presenter of “Walkers World” for ITV and close friend of Catherine Zeta Jones about photographic rates paid by the magazine and she told me she had just completed a trip to India for her show which included a Hello magazine feature and that the photographer had billed the magazine 5000 english pounds a day. It was the height of big budgets for editorial and by 2008 it was all over but it was great while it lasted.  

I was happy to leave the dying Australian Newspaper industry behind and concentrated on overseas media, working stints for Agence France-Presse who were wonderful and allowed me to view Australia and it’s culture as through a microscope concentrating on it’s eccentricities and strange cultural nuances. It was an eye on the daily news life of the nation and we fed the other countries of the world news and pictures via a feed which was more integrated and considered but roughly similar to the Facebooks and Instagrams of the modern age. 

And I worked for corporates like the Macquarie Bank and AGL shooting mainly portraits.

I collected images of the place I lived, Manly on Sydney’s northside. I had lived there for 30 yrs after all and I knew and loved the area. So I produced a book of photographs which sold well. 

Don’t ever take a backward step…..early 1980’s New Zealand

“Hey! You looking at me?” Hey, you looking at Me?….Hey you! You looking at Me?

It was a fairly common mantra growing up in New Zealand in the 1980’s. It was a challenge really. Usually it ended up in a scrap and fight  or whatever you like to call it. People say the violence is bad these days but as I recall it was far worse in the 1950’s and 60’s.

This time I was in the middle of the Lake Hotel in Taupo. Maori bar, in fact I was probably the only white face in the place out of around 300-400 people. Maoris in the enormous barn/bar tended to gather in groups. Down the whole of one side there were elders, full of colour and wisdom and then over in the back left timber workers, rasta’s and dope smokers back right with easy access to the back door, just next to them was the gays and trannies. There were all types. I didn’t know them all.

You’d probably wonder why I went to this place. Well I liked the people, some of them anyway. There was young Jimmy, a Maori fella of very few words but of obvious high ranking family. You simply felt this in him. I can’t remember what we talked about but I remember how he “felt”. It was a combination of easy listening, dignity, humility and wisdom and he was younger than me! And there were others, special people, different people and scary people too. 

There was “Taxi” Kapua who had been born in the back of a taxi on the way to hospital and Lincoln Abraham, the coolest dude who always wore sunnies and a big black texan hat and who drove the truck for the local bitumen crew and who, in a way we ended up naming our son after. Lincoln’s truck towed a big corrugated iron hut with a cooker in it. When the weather was bad the boys were all in there cooking “pork bones and cress”. In fact when the weather was good they were in there too.

I heard the words and ignored them, then they came again. “Hey you! You looking at ME!” I glanced up and thought they might have been directed at me and the third time I knew they were. The talking and shouting around us had begun to grow quieter and I knew I had to do something.

I quietly and slowly picked up my beer and very, very slowly moved around to the man who was venting his spleen on me. I held my drink low, focussed on his eyes and came up very close to his face, perhaps six inches. I was doing everything in my power to appear non threatening. Like I said these words uttered were “fighting words”. 

“I’m not sure how or if I have offended you but you had better let me know now because I don’t know and I suspect the rest of the bar hereabouts is wondering now too.” 

I knew this was the moment all hell could break loose and that is one of the reasons I came in so close.

He seemed shocked and speechless and nothing came out so I resumed my seat and the bar reverted to it’s usual cacophony. 

A moment later I felt an arm on my shoulder and the next thing this guy was weeping his heart out to me, telling of all his troubles and what a wonderful man I was…….

My mind swings back to how it was for those men who lived in New Zealand a century before. Just about to a man they had to know how to handle a gun. You were forced to fight. The Maoris were a formidable foe. They had been busily murdering each other for at least a couple of centuries before any white men appeared on the scene. They had trickled into NZ from the Sth Pacific and found a haven of wildlife. Birds, great big ones you could walk straight up to and bonk on the head and eat. And there were plenty of them and other types of birds too. They bought pigs with them and the seas abounded with Kai Moana. Fish, crayfish, eels and shellfish of all descriptions. They were industrious and clever and grew crops too but after  a few centuries New Zealand was in an ecological and over population crises. Tribal boundaries were strictly adhered to and continual disputes over territory led to wars and cannibalism.

14 March 2023

It took me over 60 yrs to find Taranaki. I thank Rob Tucker for that but in the early 1980's a group of us led by the irrepressible Auckland Woodturner and sailor Frank Brough bought the old Albany sawmill.

I'd done my time on a couple of Auckland newspapers taking pictures and had had enough so I moved into the Mill. Albany was still a gorgeous rural landscape of strawberry fields and apple orchards. I used to visit an old flour mill and the bloke there used to grind up corn which I made into corn-bread. 

Last week I was up in Auckland again and someone urged me to visit Albany Mall. Not a bad Mall, like most Westfield Malls but strolling through it I felt like Rip Van Winkle. 

The Albany basin has been developed. We expect development but the traffic design in that place is absolutely appalling. People sit for hours in cars that go virtually nowhere and they pay an extra 25-30 cents a litre for the privilege. Now the poor people of Auckland are being stiffed an extra 10% for their water...

Frank Brough, pictured above was one of the most extraordinary people I ever knew. He came from a big family in the South Island and had an attitude to life and it’s vicissitudes 

that is almost completely gone now but was once quite common. Nothing really bothered him. He cared for people and animals, loved machinery but was unconcerned about governments and bureaucracy. He communicated with Governments and Councils with a large “Black Beauty” pencil of the type all Kiwis used when they first learnt to write in school. He wrote eloquently with a gleam in his eye.

In fact you often saw that gleam when he was telling you stories usually up close with his eyes fixed intensely on yours. In the late seventies Frank spotted the old Albany sawmill was in trouble financially and he gathered together a bunch of us and we bought the plant for $1100.00 roughly $110 each which was about my weekly wage at the time.

I moved out there and installed myself in the Managers office which was a small wooden hut adjacent to the big break-down saw. It had been built on a bed of saw-dust and had the inevitable lean down-hill that all such sawmill buildings had. It didn’t worry me. I made two bunks at either end of the place, one with a longitudinal attitude and one that had me falling into the wall. So I could sleep with the blood running into my head or my feet or sleep with my eyes looking up through a big pine tree into the azure night sky.

The Albany Imperial Sawmill (Frank didn’t like metrification) was wonderful and joyous old place to spend a couple of years of my life. I sold firewood that I cut down from old dead wattle trees on the sides of the roads outside the growing outskirts of Auckland and thoroughly enjoyed that life until the urge to take more pictures grew in my heart and I crossed the Tasman to land in Sydney where I got offered 3 jobs in a day. 

But I never felt at home in Sydney as  had in NZ. I always wished I hadn’t but you cannot account for feelings like that in life and you just have to deal with them as best you can. Altogether I was away from my home country some 41 years.

Rob Tucker…..14 June 2023

My old confederate and friend Rob Tucker finally moved on to his next incarnation this morning. He didn’t want to go, passionately did not I believe. Despite that he continued with same old humour, courage and raw enthusiasm that drove him throughout his 75 years. We had our “set to’s” but we always came back. 

His life was always busy but in the last few months it seemed to get busier than ever so I left him alone. He went into a coma and said he awoke to several people discussing his funeral arrangements. He was highly amused by that. He sent me a text. “I need to see you Hancock”! I went to see him and got to utter Mark Twain’s immortal words “Rumours of your demise have been vastly over exaggerated”. We had some more laughs and told me he was still reading books. He loved language on a par with pictures but most all he loved a laugh. I’ll miss laughing with him…..not so many laugh as they age and even fewer laugh in the face of death itself. Salute to you Tucker an absolute one off! Pics were from Byron almost 5 years ago.

Matariki 16 July 2023

Travelling to NZ in 2005 from Sydney I wanted to reconnect with my homeland. I was part of a contingent of international journalists sent to the country to publicise Matariki. I’d never heard of the rising of the Pleiades constellation but NZ was keen, even then on promoting it to an international audience. 

I was moved to tears during a Powhiri ( welcome to country) given by this gentleman/kaumātua Tony Mako. 

He spoke eloquently in Te Reo about his love of the land from the top of Te Mata peak in Hawkes Bay. He explained in English beforehand and then spoke to his country. It was simple & honest and he explained that he would also sing to the land. 

After that he said that we would need to respond too. He spoke and sang in Te Reo with enormous heart and humility and then it was our turn. The assembled journos were from all over the world and many had tears after and were struck dumb and so I decided to respond with a wonderful Aussie number called “All among the Wool”. 

I still know that song well. 

After the deep and moving Te Reo tribute it bought the house down. We all moved from tears and seriousness to laughter in a micro second. It was an enduring and very special moment for me too.

Tarata 01 September 2023 

MOVING MOUNTAINS & WILD SpIRITS.

I often say it took me 60 years to discover Taranaki but it’s not quite true.

I was 54 in March 2007 when my old friend and comrade Rob Tucker took me up to Bryan & Helen Hocken’s mixed sheep and cattle property that borders the Waitara river in hill country Tarata. It’s a beautiful property but pretty tough country. I mean steep.

Anyway Bryan took us up to the tops to move a few sheep around. He was/is a wizard with dogs and back then he had a wonderful animal that bought back some sheep from as far as the eye could see to our very feet while we had a beer in the afternoon sun.

Then he proceeded to shift another herd through a gate.

Rob and I meanwhile clicking away madly as photographers do.

I went back to Sydney but that afternoon remained powerful in my head. 

I moved the mountain slightly in PS. Not something I often do but it did make a picture. Later that picture sold to NZ Tourism and they stuck it up in the Auckland airport. 

You walk past it and you hear dogs barking I believe. If you look closely you can see Bryan standing at the bottom right.

Yesterday, 16 years later Maria and I re-visited Bryan & Helen. I wanted to take him a print of the pic. He had never seen the full pic with the mountain. 

We talked about Rob of course, of his passion and generous wild spirit. Bryan is a great admirer of Fred Dagg and dresses a bit like him. He’s a curious and out-going bloke with a great interest in the outside world and little time for cant and bullshit. He kind of typifies what NZ used to be like before the world went mad. Up there yesterday across the saddle in the little hidden valley of Tarata on a beautiful early spring day we still felt Rob floating in the air around us……

Ned Neville in his Albany Car wrecking yard.Most photographers like car wreckers and demolition yards. I’ve spent hours in them over my lifetime. The first Car Wrecker I recall was Ned Neville’s yard north of Auckland at Albany. To a teenager Ned’s extensive yard littered over many acres was hugely attractive but Ned was cautious maybe even paranoid, perhaps for good reason. He had an old bus in amongst the wrecked cars in which lived an assistant who also doubled as a night watchman. I’m sure I saw a shotgun somewhere there. I never dared to ask Ned for a picture. He’d probably have thought I’d be back later to do over his yard.

The man in the riotous office at “Primos” demo yard in Brookvale in Sydney 1996 is also Ned and a far friendlier sort of fellow than Ned from Albany. I always loved his office. His father in law, “old man Primo” is not in the picture but his home made wine is in a large flagon top right of pic. Being Italian lunch was always well provisioned with healthy doses of said wine included.

Primo’s Demolition was a total riot in the early days but gradually as Ned took over from his father in law he managed to restore some degree of order. The old site was being surrounded by modern commercial buildings and Westfield had opened just down the road so I suppose Ned felt some pressure to conform. The yard certainly looked better and you could actually find things categorised together…..

Bruce Mackenzie Moss died at the Elizabeth R Home in Stratford over the weekend 163 days short of his 100th Birthday. As there will be no funeral or service I couldn't let the day pass without sharing some of my experiences with the old boy who I only knew for the last 4 years of his life. In 2021 he simply walked up and introduced himself in the street outside the Eltham Post Office that we were restoring at the time. There was something different about this passerby so I invited him inside and discovered that like myself he had worked as a photographer for the world's media. We both left NZ to pursue careers, him ending up in Canada working as a magazine photographer/writer covering the whole of Canada often flying himself in his Cessna on assignments. When he took the job the company gave him a full set of Leica Cameras and a pretty fancy car, I suppose they paid for fuel for the plane and a degree of maintenance also. I was also drawn to Bruce because he was well-educated. Turns out he was a founding pupil at St Peters Cambridge where both my elder brothers had been sent as young boys in the mid 1940's. Bruce of course had attended earlier. He once told me which "number" he had been but I have forgotten. The founding principal and "owner" was Arthur Francis Broadhurst who had inherited a fortune through his family's involvement in the Cotton industry and after a decade of searching founded the school February 22 1936 with 36 boys and 7 staff.......Bruce, of course was one of them! "Broady" as he was known fostered a holistic approach to education that emphasized the development of mind, body, and spirit. He had an unusual style and sometimes probably too close relationships with some of the boys. Broadhurst appears to have been a mostly kindly figure in the boy's lives but at one time was summoned to Auckland to meet with a Supreme Court judge whose son he had belted with the cane till he bled. He was spoken to in terms that made it clear that he was never to administer corporal punishment ever again and apparently he did not.

Arthur Broadhurst also gave Bruce his first experience with photography, handing him his Twin Lens Rolleiflex to use one day. When Bruce walked into my studio one day in September 2022 he spotted my Rollie and told me it had the first camera he had ever used so I snapped him with it. He was never short of pride in his achievements in life and I think he was pretty proud of the portrait I made of him. I made a big canvas print of it and lent it to him a couple of times which I suppose he proudly showed to visitors at the Elizabeth R Home. It is now back on the wall here at the Post Office. It is one of the great satisfactions we photographers had in life that people recognise an ability to capture the soul of a person and Bruce saw that too of course. Bruce told me that whilst he largely enjoyed his time at St Peters later educational experiences at New Plymouth Boys High were tough. He was not a "sports guy" and in those times in NZ that often meant you were bullied and reviled and that was the case for Bruce and as a consequence he spent many hours on his own. On a recent visit to see him just some weeks ago he told me he had been out cycling one afternoon when he sat down to rest with a view of Mt Egmont and he received a epiphany and that although he did not believe in God he was told he would always "be looked after" in Life and he told me he had been and was fully satisfied with his life and the way he had lived it. When I questioned him closer he said...."Well look, you're here today aren't you?" Later stories of meeting celebrities and stars in the course of his career are part and parcel of a photographer's life but it was always still fascinating for me to hear Bruce's yarns. How he had stamped his foot on Anthony Artmstrong-Jones hand when he tried to scramble onto Bruce's hired scaffolding on a film set one evening. How he sailed across the Atlantic on a cruise with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, had dinner with Danny Kaye (disgusting little man) and Sammy Davis Junior ( a filthy little individual who wiped his hands on my shirt). How he had seen nude photographs of the Duke of Edinburgh and many other notable English toffs romping in swimming pools. And how his last assignment as a staff photographer was the first flight of the Boeing 747 in 1969. For this and many other reasons I called him Methusalah.....(Many younger people had no idea of the people he was talking about.) I always told Bruce I came to see him for his wicked humour and incisive insights. One time he told me "I'm the oldest bugger in this place and I have outlived several managers and all the other residents and they want me gone but I'm not giving them that satisfaction!" He also said "You get all types in these places, the good, the bad and the just plain ugly. I saw one resident at the doctors the other day and I said to her, "I hope it's nothing too trivial"! Hell, it's not many times these days that you run into people that speak their minds as plainly as Bruce did and now he himself is gone I will miss that bloody wicked humour. Farewell Bruce you did well in reflecting back to the world just what it is.......