Harry Seidler

Australian personalities, 1970-1997 / photographed by Peter Luck

Jorn Utzon, creator of the Sydney Opera House.

Sir Davis Hughes, NSW Minister for Public Works

Jim Comerford, a coal mine worker at Rothbury in New South Wales

John Coburn, painter

Vincent Lingiari, tribal elder of the Gurindji tribe

Peter Allen

Peter Allen and Pro Hart

Belinda Emmett

Gwen Meredith

Australian personalities, 1970-1998 / photographed by Peter Luck

SL17 Joern Utzon, creator of the Sydney Opera House. I took this shot of Utzon on the island of Styrso, off the Swedish coast during the making of a documentary for the ABC TV show This Day Tonight. In 1956 a $10,000 international design competition had attracted 234 entries from thirty-six countries;  the four-man panel of judges chose a bold sketch of graceful sails by the thirty-seven-year-old Danish architect who was a devotee of such architectural giants as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Work started in 1957. At that time the cost was quoted at about $7.5 million. The trouble was that nothing quite like Utzon’s building had ever been built. Utzon did not really know how his magnificent sails could be constructed and soon, like Walter Burley Griffin, the designer of Canberra before him, he ran into tremendous difficulties with the bureaucrats and politicians over time, cost and management. To everyone’s horror it soon became clear that the shells as drawn could not even support their own weight. He told me on camera: “We were half-finished with the base and I was sitting there with a big problem. (laughter)
I asked him whether when he made his original drawings did he really have any idea how to make those shells:
“Yes, I thought we could make them as thin concrete shells ... but we couldn’t get enough height and so we tried with engineers for two years, two and a half years to make up the shells and other things. And the engineers one day came in and said we give up. Go somewhere else.”
The controversial genius left the project amidst great controversy in 1966, never to return.

SL18 Sir Davis Hughes, NSW Minister for Public Works, was Joern Utzon’s nemesis — the politician who eventually sacked the architect. Hughes pinned most of the blame for the troubles on the hapless Dane. In 1999, and then in his 90s, Sir Davis Hughes told me:
“When we got to the stage of wanting the thing finished he wasn’t able to give us anything. The point I want to make is he had no plans for anything beyond the shells.”
“What was your reaction when you received an envelope containing Utzon’s resignation?”, I asked Sir Davis.
“One of relief ... great relief”, he replied
"More than that?” I persisted. “Did you jump up in the air ... click your heels?”
Sir Davis Hughes: “No, I didn’t ... but I could have.”

SL19 Jim Comerford. The Great Depression, which began in 1929 and continued until the mid 1930s, was a terrible time for Australian workers and Jim Comerford, a coal mine worker at Rothbury in New South Wales experienced more hardship than most. The miners were caught up in a tragic scenario which saw their livelihoods destroyed and the word Rothbury still leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of trade unionists today. James Scullin, who became Prime Minister after Billy Hughes when he led a revolt which toppled the conservative Bruce government, should have been a working class hero - but he lost important support soon after coming to power. He refused to intervene in the New South Wales coal strike in 1929. When the New South Wales government sent troops into the Rothbury mine and killed and injured strikers, many unionists never forgave him for ignoring the call for federal intervention. In Sydney thousands of people took to the streets to protest about the killing of the young Rothbury miner, Norman Brown: ‘Norman Brown’s body lies a mould’ring in the grave, But we’ll go marching on.” sang the miners but most of them faced the depression without a job.

SL2O John Coburn. A softly spoken and gentle man, John Coburn, nevertheless, painted on large and powerful canvasses, creating vibrant shapes and symbols that have become as familiar to Australians as some of our natural forms, such as Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). Among his largest and most famous works are the Sun and the Moon curtains designed for the Sydney Opera House. A deeply spiritual man, Coburn was, unlike many of Australia’s foremost painters, committed to abstractionism, although his pure, simple, bold and brightly coloured shapes pay homage to Matisse and other members of the School of Paris who had a great effect on the young Coburn. Coburn was a naval radio operator during World War II and later enrolled in the National Art School in Sydney. He taught art in a number of High Schools and was much revered by his students and other artists in Australia and overseas. He died in Sydney 2006 at the age of 81.

SL21 Vincent Lingiari. Tribal elder of the Gurindji tribe, Lingiari led the famous protest at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in 1966 when a group of Aboriginal stockmen walked off Wave Hill station owned by the British beef barons, the Vesteys. The Aborigines were being paid less than a quarter of the minimum wage of the whites and sometimes they got only salt-beef, bread, tobacco, flour, sugar and tea. The Gurindjis said they were sick of it, they wanted their own place. One day they simply took a bale of wire and fenced off some of the Vestey land. The Gurindjis’ leader, Vincent Lingiari, was soon confronted by Mr. Morris, the station manager. In 1973, sitting on the bank of Wattle Creek, Lingiari told me: “We all got the wire for the fence and carry them on the shoulder - everybody bring it up here, and we start that morning, cutting up poles, and so we put it up. Straighten her up, right around, finish it. And Mr. Morris came along and he said, Hey, you steal another man’s country.’ ‘Oh yeah, that’s alright.’ And I said, ‘No, well, what was before the Vestey born and I born? It was black feller country.”
This statement crystallised the whole story of the Gurindjis’ struggle for land rights and was the birth of a movement that changed the entire shape and economic and social makeup of the Australian continent.

SL22-SL22A Peter Allen. From Tenterfield to The Big Apple. He began his extraordinary showbiz career as a member of the pop singing duo The Allen Brothers, twisting away in collarless Beatle suits and winkle-picker shoes on shows like Brian Henderson’s Bandstand and then went on to carve out a solo career as the darling of the New York cabaret scene. Not a great singer but an energetic and tireless entertainer he could make a middle-aged room jump for joy singing and shaking their maraccas... “I go to Rio.. .de Janeiro. . .“ His act was shamelessly campy, glitzy and glamorous and he still has hundreds of imitators with some, such as Hugh Jackman, almost building second careers out of Allen’s old material. The Boy from 0z a musical based on the life and times of Peter Allen has been a huge hit, both here and overseas. Allen could also reduce an audience to tears with sentimental ballads such as “I still call Australia Home” which has become perhaps the nation’s second, unofficial national anthem. Allen made no secret of being gay, although he had a puzzling marriage to Judy Garland’s daughter, Liza Minelli, and his poignant death at age 40 did not come as a complete surprise. This shot was taken at a charity function during which the Broken Hill mine worker, turned artist, Pro Hart, painted landscapes on a piano and then played it as the paint dried while Peter sang to the delighted crowd.

SL23. Peter Allen and Pro Hart. Peter Allen always encouraged other artists in all fields of expression. He formed an instant rapport with Pro Hart, during the making of the TV series The Australians in 1980. Pro Hart, who in the 1950s, emerged from the coal mines of Broken Hill as a “primitive” folk painter became a household name in Australia. An eccentric, whose studio-cum-art gallery in the outback, might have a Rembrandt in one corner and a set of gymnasium equipment in another, Hart also plays Bach Fugues on a giant pipe organ in his rambling house that seems to have been built by a bower bird. Appearing together at an exhibition in Sydney in 1980, Peter sang while Pro played a piano and then painted it.

SL24. Belinda Emmett was beautiful and talented — a soapie star, but a charming one who could also sing and dance superbly and was destined to be one of the leading ladies of Australian entertainment.. until she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease which can be particularly devastating when contracted by very young women. Belinda faced her eventually fatal foe with extraordinary stoicism. She remained a sunny presence on the entertainment scene, despite the ravages of her cancer and its treatment and as the end neared, married her supportive partner, the equally famous Rove McManus. She was featured on a deeply moving episode of the ABCTV series Australian Story which attracted a huge audience and won a Logie in 2008.

SL25 Gwen Meredith. By the l940s, radio was at its peak of popularity — “the golden age of the valve wireless”. Competition between the stations was fierce, and for the first time announcers were becoming celebrities. Serialised dramas - the forerunners of the TV soap opera - were hugely popular. And a young woman named Gwen Meredith created the mother of all serials for the ABC called Blue Hills. It would become a national institution.
An inoffensive saga of country life, Blue Hills has been called the most successful radio serial in the world. It ran for a staggering 5795 episodes. Even grown men were known to clamber out of the sheep dip at lunchtime to find out how Dr. Gordon and Granny Bishop were getting on. For thirty years, Gwen Meredith improvised her mundane country adventures straight into an office dictation machine.
How did she feel when it finally ended I asked her: “A little bereft ... and the general tenor of the letters was, “Well if you’re bereft, what about us?” One letter was from North Queensland, and this woman said that when she heard it announced on the air that the serial was going off, she went around in a state of shock all day. When the shock wore off, she said perhaps I was doing her a favour because as I was getting old and tired I might have died, and then she would never have known what happened.”

SL26 Harry Seidler. Aside from Joem Utzon, creator of the Sydney Opera House, architect Harry Seidler has probably done more to change the Australian cityscape than any other individual. With his bow ties and Bauhaus philosophies, evangelized with a touch of arrogance, Viennese born Harry strode the Australian architectural world like one of his skyscrapers — crisp concrete monoliths that attracted worshippers and critics in equal numbers. Truth is, Seidler, gave us some of our best and worst buildings. Australia Square, our first cylindrical office block and in its day, Sydney’s largest and most imposing building, with its abnormal amount of free space around it, revolutionised the city’s CBD. On the other hand, most Sydneysiders would gladly put a bomb under the infamous Blue’s Point tower which stands on the tip of one of the harbour’s most prominent and picturesque fingers of land as the city’s architectural sore thumb. Despite the vehemence of his critics Seidler revolutionized Australia’s suburban architecture when he took on local government in the 1950s and built a box-like, flat roofed house on Sydney’s leafy north shore - to the horror of residents still coming to grips with Federation houses and Californian bungalows. Among Seidler’s scores of other projects are the rather grandiose Australian embassy in Paris, and here I photographed him on the sensuous balcony of his residential Horizon Building which dominates the Kings Cross skyline. [Photograph taken 1998].

Reference:
Peter Luck's notes on Library correspondence file

Harry Seidler

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