Crossroads: Ellis and Stacey capture Sydney in the 1970s

IN 1971, two photographers, Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey, held an exhibition at the then new Yellow House in Potts Point, Sydney.

IN 1971, two photographers, Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey, held an exhibition at the then new Yellow House in Potts Point, Sydney.

It included pictures of Martin Sharp and others at work painting the rooms of the house, although the emphasis was on the life of those who lived and worked in the night-life land of Kings Cross.

At the same time they published Kings Cross, Sydney: A Personal Look at the Cross, which includes lively and engaging writing by Ellis as well as photographs by both men. On the cover is a shot of Carlotta, the famous drag queen from Les Girls, the all-male revue that had been one of the great attractions of the Cross since the mid-1960s.

The picture says much about the nature of the place and its relation to the rest of Sydney and Australia, especially in 1971. The hill occupied by Kings Cross, Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay has long been the most densely populated part of the continent and, well before the gentrification of the inner-city quarters, was already a haven for the unconventional, including artists and would-be artists, foreigners, bachelors and spinsters, the rich, the poor and the criminal.

Kings Cross was an island of extravagance in a sea of suburbia. There were bars, strip clubs and brothels, but Les Girls is a particularly interesting phenomenon: it was a place where respectable middle-class people came to gaze momentarily into a very different world, a bottomless pit of fantasy, illusion and fascinating depravity where some of their most fundamental moral assumptions could be allowed to dissolve for a couple of hours.

Pictures from the book and the original Yellow House show are now part of an exhibition of photographs by Ellis and Stacey at the Museum of Sydney. There is one of Carlotta in costume, singing or pretending to sing in a haze of red light, and another black-and-white shot of her seen in her make-up mirror, surrounded by telltale fragments of backstage life: an improvised wig-stand, a photograph of Marlon Brando and a wad of American dollars.

The colour shots are by Stacey and are mostly nocturnes and interiors, so the hues are rich and dark, dominated by the prevailing lighting of the various bars and restaurants and strip joints he takes as his subjects. The black-and-white pictures are by Ellis and they tend to have the more matter-of-fact quality of a chronicle.

Both colour and black and white are shot, according to the book, with available light and, importantly, are not cropped or edited in the darkroom; as in such contemporary films as Midnight Cowboy (1969), there is a real commitment to a style of unadorned documentary realism.

A few weeks ago I quoted Henri Cartier-Bresson's remark about the photographer as a hunter of decisive moments. Photography loves to capture the transient; red-light districts, and places where people drink, let their hair down and escape from their usual routines, are rich in colourful instants that are poignant too, because these moments of exuberance and evasion are by their nature brief.

Ellis's and Stacey's photographs are the record of a moment in the history of the district, as well as a phase in Australian culture. Some of the pictures, such as that of the exuberant hippie in front of the El Alamein fountain, seem to evoke a certain joyous innocence, although others speak of vulgarity and degradation and hint at the brutality of the criminal world.

The Cross in 1971 was already being attacked by property developers intent on destroying its elegant historic buildings. Things got worse in the immediately ensuing years.

The NSW branch of the Builders Labourers Federation imposed "green bans" in 1972 to protect the handsome terrace houses in Victoria Street; they lasted until 1974, when the Communist federal head of the union, bribed by developers, sacked the state leadership.

In 1975, Juanita Nielsen, who ran a conservation campaign with residents of the street, was murdered, apparently for her anti-development stance. The developers proceeded to erect the atrocious blocks of apartments that now deface Victoria Street on the city side.

Meanwhile, hard drugs, which came to the Cross with US servicemen on R&R from Vietnam, destroyed the moral fibre of the place: crime became enormously profitable, prostitutes turned into junkies, police were corrupted.

Then the GIs left, and without their cash the Cross went into a long decline. The smart restaurants that were still there in 1971 all closed, and soon there was hardly a real cafe left, with exceptions such as the Piccolo Bar. Recent complaints about gentrification of the Cross and Potts Point are thus ill-conceived. By the end of the 20th century, the Cross was a depressing and tawdry place, probably at the lowest ebb of its history. In the past 10 years it has regenerated into a centre of cafes and restaurants, bookshops and food suppliers. Cheapjack souvenir shops have gone; wasteland public areas are now alive with markets and social life.

So Ellis and Stacey captured the Cross at a point when some of its rich pre-war bohemian culture was still alive, even if it had been overwhelmed by the explosion of strip clubs and brothels servicing the American soldiers and sailors: a development that coincided with the sexual revolution, for 1971 was in the very middle of the two-decade period between the commercial release of the contraceptive pill in 1961 and the appearance of AIDS in the early 80s.

This complex world is remarkably well preserved in the photos, which are presented in the exhibition with a few passages from the book as commentary. There are pictures of the GIs, ordinary boys often from small towns and the country, who may rarely have been to a city as big as Sydney and in most cases had nothing like the Cross where they came from.

They stand outside strip clubs talking to the bouncers, trying to make up their minds about where to spend their dollars during this brief respite from the horror of war.

The lives of the girls are documented with sympathetic detachment, and they seem to accept the photographer's presence without self-consciousness. In one picture -- a perfect example of the eloquent moment -- a girl pauses in the process of putting on, or perhaps removing, a bra to take a drag on her cigarette. She is made up and her hair is done in the bouffant fashion of the time, but she wears old and slightly baggy panties, the opposite of the flashy sequinned costume of performance. In another shot and wearing only the dowdy undergarment, she demonstrates her erotic act with a giant python.

Bouncers and other male staff appear in many pictures, most memorably the master of ceremonies of the Paradise Club, whose oversized velvet bow tie, thick sideburns and Mexican moustache sum up the stylistic disasters of the time.

His huge toothy grin and strangely avid gaze, like that of a beast fixed on its prey, seem less a revelation of the man's character than an embodiment of his audience's insatiable appetite for the spectacle he is about to offer them. Non satiatur oculus visu: the eye is not sated with sight.

The world of these spectators is evoked in another picture of the entrance of a club: they mill around rather furtively in raincoats, and the sign advertises a midnight show. Elsewhere on the streets, though, are other preoccupations; the Cross has always been a place where disparate lives weave together, sometimes incongruously.

In a picture called Generation Gap, a natty  older man in a three-piece suit and a young hippie wearing what looks like a tablecloth pass in the street. In another, a group of Hare Krishna chants in the doorway of a bank as a bad-tempered old woman in sunglasses walks past, followed by a young man in denim, open-shirted and wearing a chain, absorbed in the oblivion of narcissism.

Around the El Alamein fountain clusters a group of party-goers at the end of the evening, in a hazy state of fatigue and drunkenness; some are about to leave, plans for seduction gone awry, others still cling to the hope that they will not go home alone. The Cross is a place where human transactions take place at every level, from the most squalid and venal to the romantic.

The experience of the images in book and exhibition is different in a number of ways: principally because the pictures are isolated and enlarged in the museum, whereas they are variable in dimensions and clustered in groups on the page, but also because in the show they are captioned, so that time, place and significance are more precisely defined.

The images thus tend to become more self-contained and monadic, while in the book they are not captioned but left as it were open-ended. This induces you to look for further explanation at the adjacent text, which does not directly explain the pictures, but is composed as a dialogue with them.

A good example of this is the photograph that has been chosen for the cover of the exhibition booklet, and which originally appeared on page 30 of the book in quite a small reproduction opposite the Hare Krishna picture and beside a passage speaking of the diversity of life at the Cross.

The image is telling and touching. It shows a black American soldier kissing a woman in a hat, holding a purse and cigarette in her hand, while her friend, standing behind, looks on and smiles. These are not prostitutes but rather a couple of the many young women who came to the Cross to meet these servicemen, drawn by loneliness, the romance of uniform, and perhaps a kind of cultural memory of how an earlier generation of Australian girls had fallen for American soldiers during World War II.

These young women are neither beautiful nor sophisticated. Nor are they very young. Their unremarkable looks are made harder and more vulgar by the 70s fashion for plucked eyebrows and large, ungainly tinted glasses. They are undoubtedly lower middle-class or working-class girls from staid backgrounds whose lives have been changed by the new permissiveness of the 60s.

They have come to Cross, and the girl with the cigarette is delighted to find a handsome black soldier. He is lonely and sexually frustrated; back from war, he will soon return to danger and possibly death. Her life is dull and unfulfilled. Ellis has captured the meeting of these two strangers whose lives briefly intersect in a moment of delight at the Cross: a place of intersections but also of ultimately divergent paths.