Fourteen years after his death, a dream comes true for 'scallywag' Rennie Ellis

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?

Traffic, Toorak Rd, c.1970.Credit: Rennie Ellis

When Ellis died suddenly on August 19, 2003, Australia was already a very different place to the one he had captured so thoroughly and so lovingly for most of his life. Digital cameras had nudged out his beloved film stock. Sunblock had all but banished the skin-frying oils of old. And the bare-fleshed, decadent denizens of Melbourne had, by and large, zipped themselves up and put their shoes back on.

That carefree, adolescent nation that emerged from its colonial awkwardness and into a sun-kissed, up-yours tomorrow had grown wary. Smoking would kill us. Skin cancer was our collective enemy. And dragster-riding schoolboys went nowhere without a helmet.

Surfer with girl, Lorne, c.1968 (detail).Credit: Rennie Ellis

In its largest photographic acquisition to date, the State Library of Victoria (SLV) has now acquired more than half a million Rennie Ellis images. Collectively, they offer a glimpse of an era we might otherwise forget. Ladies in hats. Workers playing cricket in their lunch break. A gallery crowd watching a performative artwork without a single mobile phone in sight. And unself-conscious partygoers baring all for the man with the ever-present camera.

Ask anyone about the work of Rennie Ellis, and they will invariably tell you about the man himself. His big personality. His unwavering curiosity. His absolute, inexaustible lust for life.

"A bit of a scallywag" is how friend and film director Fred Schepisi remembers him. "He always had a great spirit – 'let's try this, let's try that; we haven't been there, let's go there'. He was always up for an adventure and something new."

It's a spirit captured in the images themselves. There is an air of immediacy, of a moment of life snatched and celebrated before it passes. An eye for magnificence in the seemingly mundane.

Boys with dragsters, c.1970.Credit: Rennie Ellis

"They might have appeared to the world as happy snaps, but in actual fact, the best of them were capturing fantastic moments of the times," says Schepisi.

When Ellis died following a cerebral hemorrhage at the too-young age of 62, he left behind a few suggestions. His widow, Kerry Oldfield Ellis, remembers reading his will after that awful day in August 2003. Along with various suggestions about how best to preserve those towering stacks of images, negatives and writings he was leaving behind was this: "Look, that could all be a bit too difficult, but anyway, I'm going to bale now; at least the best thing about being dead is I won't have to shave". A punchline, then, even at the end.

Confrontation, Gay Pride Week picnic, Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, 1973.Credit: Rennie Ellis

What Ellis really wanted, she says, was for his images to end up at the SLV, historical repository for his beloved home town. And now, 14 years after his shutter was silenced, and more than seven years after the process began, his dream has at last been fulfilled.

Jo Ritale, the SLV's head of collections, says she has worked in libraries "for quite a long time and I've never come across a collection quite like Rennie's".

Gilbert and George at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1973.Credit: Rennie Ellis

Boxes and boxes of contact sheets, negatives and prints now sit, neatly stacked and labelled, on shelves inside the library's vast archive, a far cry from the unruly piles he left behind. They offer, says Ritale, a "unique" view of post-war Australia.

"Rennie was so focused on what people were doing in Melbourne for such an extensive period of time that it gives us this amazing resource. We had a lot of stuff from the '40s '50s and '60s, but we really didn't take it into the '80s and '90s. [The archive] covers all kinds of social and cultural activities, all the well-known people who were operating in Melbourne, all the important things to Victorians, like football and fashion and food and racing ... There's a lot of what was the ordinary person's experience of living in Melbourne and Victoria in that period."

Optimist outside National Gallery of Victoria, 1974.Credit: Rennie Ellis

The task of cataloguing Ellis' huge body of work following his death fell to Oldfield Ellis and Manuela Furci, who was Ellis' assistant for 10 years. As co-directors of the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive, which retains ownership of thousands of his images, they were determined to honour his legacy, no matter how daunting the task.

"Rennie kept everything," says Furci, whose world was "rocked" when Ellis died. "I threw out about 31 cubic metres worth of stuff. It was so huge and overwhelming. Each room was from floor to ceiling and everything was everywhere. The tax department would have loved him, he kept all his tax and financial records from the 1970s. He threw nothing out. I'm really glad he didn't, because so much of what he kept is so important historically."

Rabbit skinner, Victoria Market, c.1970.Credit: Rennie Ellis

Neither Furci nor his widow was prepared to let Ellis' work gather dust.

"It has been a very long and at times very painful process," says Oldfield Ellis. "Here we are absolutely picking apart Rennie's whole life through his work."

Fred Schepisi and Meryl Streep, September 1987.Credit: Rennie Ellis

Oldfield Ellis was a 21-year-old artist when she met her future husband at the opening night of Melbourne's first arts festival in 1986, known at the time as Spoleto. Having spent a lot of time around fashion parades and models, she had a low opinion of photographers – "but Rennie was charming ... he made anyone he spoke to feel like the most important person in the world".

When he finally convinced her to overcome her wariness and join him for lunch, "we ended up talking for the next five hours … eventually, we got together and we were together until he died".

Rennie Ellis in the 1980s. Credit: Michael Williams

Life with the effervescent Ellis was, she admits "an exercise in stamina".

"He was always going a million miles an hour ... You never knew what would would come up next. Suddenly, he was off to Europe or Sydney, or there's 10 people coming over for dinner. If you went out, it was never one thing, it would be five. He was so endlessly curious."

Let's Sing, Fitzroy Council, 1969.Credit: Rennie Ellis

His curiosity took him places. At gatherings both glittering and gritty, Ellis was part of the scene. From nightclubs to beaches, society weddings to punk concerts, people liked to have him around, says Schepisi.

"I think one of the reasons he was so successful in getting invited to parties and events so freely, and being allowed to take snaps of people doing whatever they were doing without censorship, was because he was so liked and he had such an endearing way," he says. "People felt so comfortable they would just say, 'OK Rennie, go for it'. He was able to get pictures that a lot of other people wouldn't have been able to get."

Girl and Dog in supermarket, Toorak Road, c.1970.Credit: Rennie Ellis

Famously appreciative of the female form, Ellis could also "talk the clothes off a lot of women", says Schepisi. "They would start the day as complete strangers in a cafe or in the street and somehow that afternoon Rennie would be photographing them. It's quite an extraordinary talent."

But there was more to Ellis' work than party snaps and flesh parades. As a documenter of Australia's social and cultural history, he was surely our most prolific eyewitness. His Toorak Road series of 1970-71 is an extraordinary record of place and time. Inside a busy supermarket, a little girl is captured, mid-twirl, as a dog sits patiently nearby, a tiny handbag clenched in its jaw. Two nuns stand before the Humpty Dumpty toy shop, one fairly pressed against the glass as the other smiles shyly at the camera. Six young boys perch on their bicycles in a perfect composition of youthful defiance. And in an unnamed gallery, two women in hats and pearls peer through the artworks on offer.

The General Store by Tullo, Toorak Rd, c.1970.Credit: Rennie Ellis

Elsewhere, there is unrest. A police officer is surrounded by protesters during a Gay Pride picnic in the Botanic Gardens in 1973. Hundreds gather in the streets of Melbourne to protest at the dismissal in 1975. And skinheads convey a vague air of menace during a game of pool at Melbourne's Razor Club.

They are images, says Ritale, that connect with people because they are telling the story of us.

"I've been to a few exhibitions of his work, and anecdotally, you hear people saying, as they're walking around, 'oh I remember doing that'. It's connected to their lives. It's not like high art, which is beautiful but people can't necessarily see the link with their own experiences, whereas Rennie's images are really grounded in what you do as an everyday person."

Furci says that above all, Ellis was a humanist. "His wit, humour, love of life and mankind are evident in his images. He didn't really care about F-stops. Forget about the technical things. But when he's out on the street, and he's with people, and he sees a situation, he captures that insight into the human condition, that moment in time. He would treat a drunk on the street the same way he would treat the queen. He embraced life and I think that really comes through, especially his humour. Even after 13 years of looking at certain pictures, I still laugh out loud at some of them."

Side by side with this fun-loving focus, Ellis was serious about photography's place in our collective consciousness.

"People tend to forget that he started the first photo gallery [Brummels] in Melbourne," says Schepisi. "He was at the forefront of pushing photography as an artform to be collected and taken seriously. He was already there, doing that, and I don't think people quite understood the talent that was employed in amassing the things he was doing."

As more and more of Ellis' images are digitised and made available to a new generation, that understanding will likely grow. In an age of endless selfies, instant celebrity and political wariness, we might all look back fondly on the way we were.

"Rennie loved the idea of holding a mirror up to society and showing people, this is who we are," says Oldfield Ellis. "He loved Melbourne with a passion and ... he'd have been thrilled that his work will be available for generations to come."

Strike a Pose, a panel discussion on the works of Rennie Ellis and his predecessors, is at the State Library of Victoria on September 2, as part of Melbourne Fashion Week. slv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/strike-pose. The Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive is at rennieellis.com.au