Up the Cross

First published on 12 Feb 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Forty years ago, two young photographers - Rennie Ellis from Melbourne and Wesley Stacey from Sydney - embarked on a six-month project to photograph the bustling Kings Cross scene. Hippies, artists, drag queens, prostitutes and American GIs on leave from Vietnam all passed in front of their cameras, and the results were immortalised in a 1971 book that was launched with an exhibition and party at the famous Yellow House artists' collective in Macleay Street.

The book has been out of print for many years, but the images Ellis and Stacey shot are on show once again at the Museum of Sydney from this month. Organised with the help of the Rennie Ellis Archive (Ellis himself died in 2003), Up the Cross is a window on Australian society at its most colourful and uninhibited.

"It was a very interesting time for Kings Cross," says Museum of Sydney curator Inara Walden. "The streets were teeming with hippies and soldiers on R&R. [Drag club] Les Girls was going on, and [hippie musical] Hair was playing at the Minerva Theatre in Orwell Street. And the Yellow House had opened, with Martin Sharp and other artists. So it was a very happening period."

The project was conceived by Ellis, who met Stacey during the 1960s when they were both contributors to pioneering fashion magazine POL. Sporting shoulder-length hair and a Genghis Khan moustache, Ellis photographed the passing Darlinghurst Road parade in black and white, while afro-wearing Stacey used vibrant colour and a fisheye lens to capture groovy interiors of clubs such as Whisky a Go-Go.

Also armed with a tape recorder, Ellis interviewed various denizens of the dirty mile. "Rennie had a really lovely turn of phrase," says Walden, "and we're sprinkling the exhibition with fantastic quotes from the book."

Stacey, 68, recalls the Kings Cross of 1970 as a relaxed, friendly place. "In those days you could walk around with a camera and blast away and there wasn't this paranoia of ‘who's pointing a camera at me?' It was a very stimulating place just on the street, let alone in nightclubs or strip clubs."

However, it was also an era of rampant organised crime, and some subjects were out of bounds. "We spoke to a few crims but we never photographed them," says Stacey. "We had to be extremely careful not to go crashing into gangsterland like innocents. You could be damaged, or disappear."

The two took their concept to publishers Thomas Nelson Australia. "We convinced them to take it on by saying that the R'n'R boys were likely to buy the book as a souvenir to take back to the States." The pair's original title, Poking around the Cross, was deemed too suggestive, and the book went to press with the more prosaic title Kings Cross Sydney: A Personal Look at the Cross.

Ellis went on to publish 16 more books and to found Brummels Gallery, the first photography gallery in Australia. Stacey helped set up the Australian Centre for Photography, which is still going strong to this day. Based in Bermagui on the south coast of NSW, Stacey is bemused by the renewed interest in this series. "I thought, who's going to be interested in Kings Cross in 1971?" he laughs. "But everyone I spoke to about it was very interested." Nick Dent