“With 8mm you have all the immediate potentiality of the powers of a sketch. You have that brevity, the quickness, the lightweightedness of the camera, that expendability of it. Nothing in the area of 8mm will ever be in the consideration for prizes or awards.”

We’d seen some of Conner’s movies during the Co-op days but it is this lecture by Stan Brakhage on Conner at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, April 1973, that gives you a greater understanding of him as an artist. There’s links to videos.

In 1986, I heard that the legendary Colorfilm laboratory liaison Bill Gooley was dying of cancer. I had met him a few times so I knew had to tell his story for Cinema Papers. Somewhat anxiously I rang him to see if he’d like to talk for the Technicalities section.

A Polaroid to remember things by: editing from 1/2 Sony portable to 1/2 inch mains deck. TV sets were our monitors- using the RF (antenna) input not many had a video line input, couch cushions were our tilt bases.

These photographs were taken in a city jazz – folk club in 1970? Frank wasn’t expecting me (well, he was but he’d forgotten. I had asked if I could photograph him some days before) and he said he was happy to help a photography student. Video links included.

While I was a student at RMIT . We rented the top three rooms upstairs from Crest Records for a studio. And there was a bathroom that we turned into a darkroom.

Here’s a small poem, or maybe a country fable, from my Another Country Diary of that date.

Like all my ‘commercial’ assignments they were opportunities to make more personal work, some of which ended up in my class portfolios. This was a performance at an aged care home.

Unlike those years with you, my wife hasn’t been through a film making affair.

While remaking some old film splices, I was thinking about conjunctions, those joining words and the relation to film.

John Hughes has got it almost right in his piece on the rise and fall of the film cooperatives.  I’m conspicuous by my absence but it doesn’t matter and I’m grateful for him documenting things I’ve stopped remembering.

I was given a box of Dr Leslie Woods home movies because “the family didn’t want them”. That was a mistake, as you’ll see they’re an invaluable record of an Albury country doctor’s life.

The family movies. The people and friends he clearly loved, and what interested him as he grew older – fishing

The promise of the apocalypse. With a big enough flood, one gets to start over completely.

Don’t look for much about my friend Jim Wilson on the web. This may be the best you’ll find.

I curated an exhibition at the Hawthorn Art Gallery in 1979. It ran for two weeks, I bought the wine and cheese, the projector, U-matic and paid for some telecine transfers.

First published in Sydney Morning Herald Good Living section September 2009. Did you know that the biggest selling food writer in Japan has lived in Sydney for the past twenty years? When he finished university Tetsuya Totsuka planned to be a nuclear physicist. Today he is one of the most respected writers of food manga […]

As in exasperated ‘Why does ANYONE need another country diary?’ It was an overdone web ‘meme’ at the time I did these, lots of back to the land, nature poets etc. I didn’t care about that readership I was just ‘keeping track’ of who I was.

An attack on “some of the hairiest, scrawniest, and most discontented specimens of all time”. Hang on I said, that was me, I wanted to be Beat, did people really think that?

Like everyone given enough money to shoot a 30 min short at the time, we immediately set out to shoot a 16mm feature.

The poster that the late Albie Thoms presented, shows he had invited italian filmaker Alfredo Leonardi to present his selection of new films but Pier Farri, one of the filmmakers on the programme (but not listed on the poster) came instead.

While some of the tortured faces seem to have affronted the fellow passengers on this train trip to the Royal Show, we saw them all as kids, and got to know them. These rolls of stills show how much care and love the staff gave them.

When my parents where retired, (and younger than I am now), they sold their house and they bought a campervan. They strapped a couple of mini-motorbikes on the back and went, as you were supposed to,  ‘around Australia’. We got postcards and reports from places they liked and stayed for a while, but by the […]

Was this my first visit? It was at Easter in 1967. It is a special place and I was to visit again, never with the same group, but I did go back with Rikki and Margaret individually.  Wikipedia has a map and a bit of geology of this glacial lake and history of the ski hut. My images were on […]

A little blood goes a long way. Just ask that apparently crestfallen cockatoo who bit my finger