“My photography legitimises my voyeuristic tendencies”
– Rennie Ellis, King’s Cross
Australian photographer Rennie Ellis (11 November 1940 – 19 August 2003) took these images in Sydney’s Kings Cross over a six month period during the summer of 1970-71. We see strippers, clubbers and US servicemen raw from fighting in Vietnam enjoying R&R breaks.
As Ellis put it, Kings Cross “has a pulse rate and a lifestyle unlike anywhere else in Australia”.
“I became very interested in trying to record in words and on film what people were doing, their attitudes and lifestyles.”
– Rennie Ellis
“Much of my pleasure in photography is not in looking at the photographs, which I find boring, but my involvement in the actual situation of taking the shots, of preventing the moment from escaping forever”
– Rennie Ellis
“At her home in Victoria Street, Michele, one of the strippers, talks about her job. She is English, very likeable and in her own style intelligent and articulate. She sits in her bra and pants on the couch under an Uncle Sam Wants You for The US Army poster and plays with her kitten.
‘Well actually I arrived in Australia with only $6 so I caught a cab, told the driver I danced, he told me he knew where I could get a job and took me to the Paradise Club and I started the next day waitressing and stripping. I used to do tables, jump up, get my gear off, then back on the tables. It was quite hard work really. But I liked it in the Cross. Compared with places like Soho and the Reeper-bahn in Hamburg it’s much more friendlier, not so vicious. It’s closer knit. Everyone knows everyone. And the bosses, the big guys, are more approachable here, you know, more like people.
‘Quite a lot of women come in to the shows. Sometimes they’re in long dresses after some fancy ball and they giggle and hide their faces. It’s funny to go up and shake your fanny around and embarrass them. And we have lots of middle-aged married couples up from Melbourne. Then there’s these downright perves who just sit there having wanks. It’s awful. They come in and sit in the front row, they’ve got glassy eyes, and they just pull it out and away they go. It’s so embarrassing. I look at them as I dance past and say “put it away you filthy bastard” and they just look at you blankly. They’re miles away in a sexual fantasy of their own. Mostly they’re young guys. Then there are the old regulars of course, great characters who think it’s great if the girls talk to them.’”
– Rennie Ellis, Kings Cross Sydney: A Personal Look at the Cross
“The Whisky a Go Go claims to be the Biggest Night Spot in the Southern Hemisphere.… You walk in under an explosion of neon in William Street, past a couple of tuxedoed and handsome dandies who scrutinise each and everybody. The last thing the Whisky wants is trouble, buddy. You pay your $2 and then, like jumping through the looking glass, you’re plunged into a maelstrom — a total environment that impinges on the senses like an electrical storm. Partly it’s manufactured by the management — light balls whirling in the dark, incredibly sexy go-go girls performing in chained and mirrored cages, forty near-nude waitresses, and the thundering amplified sounds of a rock group— and partly by the people themselves, shaking and shimmying on the dance floor as if they’re caught up in the electronic vibrations that burst out in waves from the huge speakers…
“The waitresses in a kind of bikini-sarong outfit, bend over your table and their boobs just about fall out all over you. The go-go dancers in their cages, reflected all angles several times over, are curvy ladies too, and they know how to make the curves work. In g-strings and bras they writhe away for ten minutes then take a twenty minute break. Six nights a week, six hours a night they work like convulsed marionettes.”
– Rennie Ellis, Kings Cross Sydney: A Personal Look at the Cross
Born in Melbourne in 1940, Rennie Ellis worked in advertising and became a freelance photographer in 1969. Shen he passed away unexpectedly in 2003, his 500,000 unreleased photographs were moved to the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive.
Get: Kings Cross Sydney: A Personal Look at the Cross published by Rennie Ellis and Wesley Stacey in 1971.
Via: Daily Telegraph, Martyn Jolly
Would you like to support Flashbak?
Please consider making a donation to our site. We don't want to rely on ads to bring you the best of visual culture. You can also support us by signing up to our Mailing List. And you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. For great art and culture delivered to your door, visit our shop.
