I can’t believe that next week it will be 20 years since one of my best mates, the renowned photographer Rennie Ellis, left us following a cerebral haemorrhage on his doorstep in Melbourne.
Rennie was 62 and he kicked out less than 30 years into a life-defining friendship that should have had a long way to run.
In 1974 I was the editor-in-waiting of the surfing magazine Tracks, at Whale Beach, north of Sydney. I was meant to be the editor, but our publisher had forgotten, when he offered me the job, that he had earlier offered it to Californian writer John Grissim, who had just shown up out of the blue for a six-month stint in the chair.
I was left to twiddle my thumbs or go surfing until a loud, jovial fellow lumbered up the stairs and offered me the job of promoting his new surf movie as it toured the east coast. A few weeks later after a final sell-out show in Melbourne, David “Mexican” Sumpter handed me $250 in cash and advised me to take it to Bali Easyrider Travel Service and give it all to the photojournalist Rennie Ellis, a partner in the business, in exchange for a month in Bali with a motorbike and accommodation chucked in.
The pony-tailed Ellis greeted me from the centre of the messiest office I had ever seen, but he managed to get me onto a Rip Curl staff trip leaving soon, and we repaired to the pub to build the foundations of a friendship that would endure until his untimely death.
Rennie had been a hero of mine for eight years before I met him, when as a surf-crazed teenager I’d devour every surf magazine I could find. In 1966 Surfing World published his Odyssey Of A Surfer, in which Rennie documented his adventures with Torquay surf buddy Peter Troy – surfing the recently-discovered Pays Basque in France, sleeping rough on the Left Bank in Paris, crewing on a trans-Atlantic yacht voyage, hitch-hiking across the United States … For me this was the stuff of dreams, and when the opportunity came for me to travel far and wide, I modelled the mix of surf, girls and trouble on Rennie’s odyssey.
Born in Brighton on Melbourne’s bayside in 1940, Reynolds Mark Ellis was educated at Brighton Grammar and won a scholarship to Melbourne University, but in both his personal and professional life he was never going to tread a conventional path. He dabbled in ad sales before buying his first camera and heading off to see the world with Troy in 1963.
While Peter was a committed surfer who would eventually travel to 140 countries and introduce surfing to several of them, Ellis was a lifesaver and distance swimmer who never missed the annual Lorne Pier to Pub Swim. He was a competent boardrider, but what really drew him to surfing was the romance of its culture. In fact, romance was what drew Rennie to just about everything.
No matter where he travelled, you could never take the Melbourne out of Rennie, and by the end of the 1960s he was developing a reputation as that city’s leading society snapper, or “chronicler of the demi-monde”, as he liked to introduce himself. By the time I met him in 1974, he had published a book about Kings Cross, Sydney’s notorious red-light district, controversially exhibited photos of hookers and strippers from the book, opened a photo gallery above a restaurant and founded Australia’s first stock photography agency.
Although he rarely took photos of people surfing, Rennie would often meet me at surf contests to shoot the circus on the beach. He loved Bells Beach, but the bikini blitz at the first running of the Stubbies Pro at Burleigh Heads in 1977 blew his mind, and inspired him to publish a book of bronzed bare bodies called Life’s A Beach, an instant bestseller.
In the 1980s we started travelling together and working as a freelance team, which was always a lot of fun and very little work. In 1981 we made a short film called Pets In Paradise, in which we took a bevy of Penthouse Pets to Fiji, about which the less said the better. We convinced the Australian edition of Playboy to fund a feature article called Europe On A Thousand Dollars A Day – a chunk of change back then – and lolled around Lake Como, the Italian and French Riviera and Paris for endless weeks.
Since he sold me my first trip, Rennie always saw himself as my Bali guide and guru. We travelled there often with our families – even prepared a little guidebook for kids – and eventually he talked me into leasing land together. We had a plot by the river at Umelas, when it was still an untouched village, but we always seemed to be too busy to oversee the building of the humble cluster of cabanas we envisaged, and in those cowboy years if you didn’t build and provide jobs, they’d rip up your lease and sell it again.
Umelas is full of expensive villas now and the river is disgusting, but when I drive through that part of the island, I often picture Rennie and me in our declining years, sitting under some long gone palms with a cold Bintang, talking story. Was not to be.
Rennie would travel halfway around the world for a party, and expected you to do the same. We flew from Biarritz to Melbourne for Rennie’s 60th birthday in November 2000, and he did the reverse trip in July 2001 for my 50th. Still living in France, we were holidaying in Portugal when we got the call we never wanted to hear, and immediately jumped on planes to get to Melbourne for Rennie’s giant farewell at Prahran Town Hall.
On the day of the funeral poet/philosopher and cartoonist Michael Leunig published his tribute in The Age, seen here courtesy of the Ellis Archive.
I still miss that crazy, wonderful bastard every day.
The significant Rennie Ellis Archive is now managed by the State Library of Victoria and Rennie’s long-time assistant and friend Manuela Furci.
