Kings Bloody Cross: Surface Glitter and Underground Guts

As a child, Mandy Sayer lived in the basement of a Victoria Street house during the green ban era. She wrote her first short story there at the age of nine. Seventeen years later she won the Vogel Award for her first novel, MOOD INDIGO, and has since published five works of fiction, and five works of non-fiction, many of which are set in Kings Cross.

Manuela Furci was Rennie Ellis’ close friend of twenty years and his personal assistant for almost a decade from the early eighties. After his premature death in August 2003, Furci and Ellis’ widow, Kerry Oldfield, established the Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive in April 2004 with the objective to ensure that Ellis’ photographs were made available via the release of posthumous limited edition prints, exhibitions in public and private galleries and as an educational resource for all.

Over the past 13 years, Furci has collaborated with major public galleries and museums to stage exhibitions of Ellis’ body of work, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash Gallery of Art, State Library of Victoria, National Portrait Gallery, Museum of Sydney and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Furci has also curated numerous commercial exhibitions and produced two award-winning photographic books Decade: 1970-80 and Decadent: 1980-2000. Furci continues to showcase Ellis’ photographs to ensure that his significant body of work is preserved and his legacy celebrated.

Dr Martyn Jolly is an artist and a writer. He is head of photography and media arts at the Australian National University School of Art. He completed his PhD on fake photographs and photographic affect at the University of Sydney in 2003. In 2006, his book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography was published by the British Library, as well as in the US and Australia.

His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Canberra Museum and Gallery. In 2006, he was one of three artists commissioned to design and build the ACT Bushfire Memorial. In 2011, he undertook a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia and a Collection Scholar Artist in residence Fellowship at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive.

In 2014, he received an Australian Research Council Discovery grant along with Dr Daniel Palmer to research the impact of new technology on the curating of Australian art photography. In 2015, he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to lead the international project Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World. He is also researching Australiana photobooks.