Fourteen years after his death, a dream comes true for 'scallywag' Rennie Ellis
More than half a million photographs by the larger-than-life Melbourne photographer will now be preserved for generations to come.
14 August 2017
Picture this. An AFL footballer sits on the hallowed turf of the MCG, a cigarette dangling from his lips. A young man perches on the rear drop-down door of a battered station wagon as it makes its way along one of Melbourne's busiest thoroughfares. Two bleary-eyed mothers offer cigarettes to their golden-haired children, evidently unperturbed by the camera in their midst ...
To venture into the archive of photographer Rennie Ellis is to enter another world. There we were, just 30 or 40 years ago, a nation of sun-worshipping, free-wheeling, uninhibited individualists. What happened to all that bold-as-brass brio?