Training an artist is to be amongst a small minority, and for a few is a life spent amongst Bohemians. Julie Higginbotham is one who feels that couldn’t have been a better existence, and that now is time to show her images, which are almost 50 years old, portraits and street photographs that reflect that time in the 70s.

Julie Elizabeth Higginbotham, born on 17 June 1953, is listed on the Australian Prints + Printmaking website as a gallery director, photographer and printmaker. She shot her first photograph on her Auntie Linda’s Voigtlander camera, and hasn’t stopped since. Photography to her, she says, is an appendage, a part of her, so that she sees everything in a 35-millimetre frame;

“These days, when I’m a bit decrepit, I’m on my ride-on scooter with my iPhone and I photograph people that I meet in the street, and because I’m a pedestrian, I get to know these people. The sad but curious thing—and also joyous—is that, years later when I’m at their funerals, there’s my photo on their coffin. Then I have a nice little smile on my face; I’ve contributed something. Just like the Eternity Man, I’ve made my mark.”

Higginbotham went to Essendon high school with Amanda Chong and Godwin Bradbeer who both also went to Prahran.

Originally Julie had wanted to study painting, but the painting class was full. Originally Julie had wanted to study painting, but the painting class was full. Her boyfriend David , was a musician who had recently come back from Vietnam. David , Bill and Peter were all amateur photographers and the four of them would go out on the weekends photographing around Melbourne. That increased her interest in photography, so having some knowledge of the medium, in 1971 she enrolled in photography;

“My training at Prahran was a foundation for my life, because I haven’t stopped working with photography. It got into my blood as my way of recording my life and other people’s lives. It’s magic, the whole thing’s magic, since if you think about how it really started, it’s mind boggling, and now everybody’s taking photos. It was at art school that we started to think of photography as an art form. I mean, everyone’s got a camera, but can they take an art photograph? Do they actually see what they take? It’s too complex. It’s too complex.

“I was open to everything, and the critical thinking when we were all together and looking at each other’s work. That was a major positive aspect of that training at Prahran, all of us in together, with different levels of experience mixing in and being accepted into that discussion.

“Having lectured in many institutes, I understand that, as with all education, it all depends on who your teacher is. That’s why I always regard Paul Cox as my great mentor because he opened up, not just photography, but a whole world, you know, of spiritualism and everything else that he was.”

Paul Cox went overseas and asked Julie to mind his house. John Cato started teaching at Prahran, while Olly Munster came in to cover Paul’s filmmaking classes;

“John Cato was a very kind person. One of the things I remember most was his beautiful landscape photographs and environmental consciousness. He took us on a camp in central Victoria where he’d organised to get us this little miner’s college in Yapeen where we stayed overnight. In the kitchen the stools were cut down trees. He wanted to take us back in time so while we were eating our barbecue he read poetry from that period of gold mining in central Victoria, so it was really inspiring. He was really generous, taking us into the landscape, often teaching us out of the building, out of the Prahran basement.”

What Cato offered was an Australian perspective rather than just American; “… we had too much of the American and the European and not so much looking at what was actually here, at photographers and women photographers active at that time. We weren’t being told about them at Prahran…that’s not a criticism, that’s how it was.” As was also the situation in the College for women;

“There were more men than women there, and they were more technically minded. They would be in groups talking technically. And I think the women missed out in that sense… I didn’t because I researched and I had that sort of ‘male brain’ and understood technology, so that didn’t interfere with my learning, and I didn’t even take it on board. In hindsight, yes, there would be moments when I said, ‘oh, this is not fair,’ but I’ve been bullied in my workplace and all my life, so it was no different even at art school, it’s still there…”

Julie found at Prahran a course structure, very different to the rigidity of high school, which encouraged freedom of expression and in which students had the opportunity to take their own path; some went into fashion, others into commercial photography, while for some, like herself, it was an art form;

“There definitely was a style that came out of Prahran as opposed to what was happening in RMIT which was then regarded as the place to do photography for commercial work and architectural work and weddings and all of that. But Prahran was bohemian with European-influenced street photography and portraiture. I chose to do portraiture, mixing into things; I wasn’t sitting in a studio doing stylised work. It was about embracing what was happening in culture and a bit of reportage and filmmaking. All that grew out of the broader view. I can’t really talk for RMIT, but there was always that distinction; ‘we’re not like RMIT, we’re going to be artists.’”

She remembers the darkroom as a fantastic place to be, normally at night because there’d be light leaks in her rented properties;

“…a magic world, and you’ve got dodgers, the music playing. Black and white, black and white, yes, I prefer black and white photography. Then when I had to go digital, I started shooting in colour and really I didn’t like it, and still don’t like it, but I do it because that’s what people are used to. But now I shoot in colour and convert it into black and white since I see in black and white.

Beside photography, her creative outputs were painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture, and she has been writing for many years, but unpublished. When she started printmaking the tonal scale of photography, of Ansel Adams’ Zone System and its gradations of light, helped with doing the aquatints in printmaking with 20 aquatint layers or more.

Since leaving Prahran she went on to do other things just as her colleagues did;

“…but over the years there’ve been catch ups, which have been terrific. And I don’t know whether it’s the age thing, but that period in your life when you’re in your early 20s and you start having these new friends, whatever field you’re in, the college you went to is always going to be the important network of your career.”

When her musician boyfriend at the time got into a band they asked her to come and take the photographs. Then their agent who also represented other bands hired her as the publicity photographer for other events.

She relates how, being a short person and photographing the bands on stage she would take her aluminium camera case into the crowd and stand on it to get the photos from the right level. She made shots of many bands including: Hot city Bump Band, Pantha, Rock Granite, Powerhouse, Renee Geyer, Chris McNulty, Dave Flett Band, and the Dugites and also photographed cabaret performance artist Tim McKew. By then she had acquired a Nikon Ftn camera with a few lenses.;

“…some of the photos I took of Renée when I was 21 and she was 21. When they had her memorial in St Kilda I rang her agent and told them I had great black and white photos of her that hadn’t been seen before, and asked would they like them. I went down to the memorial. I’m sitting up there and they had a big display, and there were my photographs…it was fantastic. ‘That’s great,’ I thought, ‘I’m giving you something Renée.’ It was beautiful.”

In 1975 at the age of 22, she had her first solo exhibition at Paul Craft Gallery, later called Faraday Gallery, in Carlton. She exhibited black and white, hand coloured, portraits and nearly sold all;

“Bang. I was right in there, right into the field and people knew about me in Sydney…but I didn’t follow it up. I went on and did other things because I had to survive. I’ve exhibited photography since but not a lot. Now that I’m “semi-retired” I’m exhibiting at Burra Regional Gallery in South Australia through a connection there”…Denise Officer, a 1975 Painting graduate of Prahran.

Having that experience she developed confidence to go ahead with photography as a lifestyle and to make money. She made portraits, and photographs of soul bands which were produced in Ram and Juke magazines and used for publicity.

Over the years she set up a photographic businesses; one in Melbourne in partnership with a design business producing catalogues, many of them for art institutions; and in Sydney, where she worked from the Trades Hall;

“photography got me through….having that foundation gave me a career, gave me a career from which I haven’t diverged. It’s always been a big part of my life. Well, to use photography as a means of an income, I mean, that’s a big, hard, ask, isn’t it?

In the mid seventies she joined the gay scenes of Melbourne and Sydney, documented the drag  shows at the Prince of Wales Hotel in Fitzroy St. St.Kilda and photographed her male friends in ‘drag’.

In 1977 she resumed her study of art at Preston Institute of Technology at Bundoora, Melbourne where she and her colleagues developed political artworks around issues of feminism and community arts.

After she returned from Sydney, in 1978 her work continued its political trajectory when George Paton Gallery showed the mixed media exhibition Condition Incorporated – A Study of Melbourne’s Planning & Housing Problems in which she showed with Julie Clark, Peter Hannaford, and other artists.

In 1979 she moved into Rankins Lane off Little Bourke Street into a four story warehouse and there, until 1980, continued a business ‘Double J Photographics’ that she had set up in partnership with Julie Clark in 1978. Though it was an artist studio, eventually she also lived there. Opposite in a bigger studio was Mirka Mora whom she’d known her since Prahran days when her year, with Paul Cox, made This film is called Mirka.

Mirka Mora from St Kilda Historical Society on Vimeo.

Having got to know Mirka at that age, she had continued to be part of Julie’s life. She told Richard Collis, a student from RMIT whom she’d befriended at the Station Hotel, that a space had become available in Rankins Lane and he came to live in Prahran alumnus Nick Nedelkopoulos’ apartment upstairs. Mirka was downstairs and when she left, Richard and Julie, without a budget, decided to set up a gallery there. They called Iceberg, as in the ‘tip of the iceberg’. Its shows were lit with fluorescent lights because spotlights were too expensive.

In her article ‘Pay-for-your-space art displays’ in The Age [27 July 1982 p.25], Susan McCulloch, daughter of Alan McCulloch and later his co-author on the Encyclopedia of Australian Art, describes two general ways in which art galleries were run: either with the gallery taking commission on works sold, or rental of the space to the artist at a flat fee for the duration of the exhibition. ​Most of Australia’s established galleries, she writes, worked on the commission system to cover hidden costs of printing of catalogues, issuing of invitations, catering for the opening, and freighting of works, the gallery being responsible for promotion and advertising, negotiating sales, and sometimes arranging future commissions for the artist. ​

McCulloch notes that at Iceberg, then one of Melbourne’s newest galleries, artists Collis, Higginbotham (known as “Brownie”), and Serena Nankivell rented its space to artists at $100 per week and usually for three weeks, for which the gallery would mail out invitations, install the work, and provide wine for the opening. Only sales exceeding $900 incurred a commission. They did not serve as artists agents, leaving artists free to choose to show at other galleries after using Iceberg for exposure. ​The gallery was like an extension of their own studios and was ideally situated in Rankins Lane, then largely occupied by artists, and was also available for other activities such as music and performance.

Sculptor Andrew Powell who showed at Bitumen River Galleries in Canberra, where HIgginbotham later also exhibited,  remembers submitting to Iceberg a pencil drawing of his Canberra lounge room that showed posters from early Canberra printmakers, and how he got the work down to Rankins Lane:

“I remember some good things that happened in the early days of BRG – like our trip to Iceberg Gallery in Melbourne. 12 members submitted about 4 or 5 works each, [then] Dave Turnbull, myself and Nick Cosgrove drove my Kombi and Dave’s FC packed with all this art to Rankins Lane and the next day we hung the show. We stayed for a few days, across the lane in Julie Higginbotham’s studio—felt a bit funny hanging around all the rad femmes—but they were good to us. Julie and her friends drove us around and we pasted up posters (on a couple of the posh gallery art marts as well) bit like a cloak and dagger scene – anyway we drank lots of wine and coffee and the local Iceberg crowd seemed happy with the work, we even had some air time on community radio station 3CR …an interesting time” [Anni Doyle Wawrzyńczak (2020) How Local Art Made Australia’s National Capital, Australian National University Press, Canberra, p.233]

In 1981, then working as a scenic artist at GTV Channel 9 and undertaking a Fine Art Post Graduate degree in printmaking and photography at Phillip Institute of Technology, Higginbotham joined Jill Posters, an anarchist-feminist group of women who made anti-war posters and others on women’s issues.

Members included Catriona Holyoake, Carole Wilson, Julia Church, Kath Walters, Deej Fabyc, Lesley Baxter, Ally Black, Linda Brassel, Zana Dare, Maggie Fooke, Barbara Miles, Kate Reeves, Linda Rhodes, Julie Shiels, Lin Tobias, and Julia Tobin. Some were arrested while pasting posters onto walls around town at night, and now those posters are now in the collections of the Australian National Gallery, Ballarat Gallery, and the State Library of Victoria.

Julie documented other artists’ work including radical feminist performance artist Jill Orr’s The Digging In and the Climbing Out; Split/Fragile Relationships of 1982.

Higginbotham also worked in 1985 with photographer/filmmaker Sue Ford on Egami, a prescient short film on Australian identity and feminism in which an intergalactic visitor looks down from her spaceship on Melbourne and interprets its Shrine of Remembrance and other familiar Melbourne landmarks as totalitarian monuments brutally imposed on the lands of ‘the Dreaming People’, of which there is no sign left.

Though curators don’t, as a rule, sell their own work in their gallery, both Collis and Higginbotham did and in her review of Collins’ show Memory Holloway [The Age, 9 November 1983, p.14] remarked that Iceberg Gallery had become “one of the few important alternative galleries in Melbourne” and that Collins and Higginbotham had made sure that it was a place in which artists who had not shown before, or those recently finished at art school, had a place where their work could be seen. Holloway had a significant link to Prahran; she met her husband John Walker in 1979 while he was undertaking a residency at Monash University through her co-lecturer in  art historian, Patrick McCaughey when the men were both Harkness fellows in New York in the early 1970s. A further residency at Prahran College was arranged for Walker in 1980 and he settled in Australia and was appointed to the post of Dean of the VCA School of Art between 1982 and 1986.

From her own show Higginbotham made enough money to go to Europe;

“I disappeared, I ran away, I left the gallery, left the dog left my warehouse and bought a ticket to Rome in 1983 and returned to Sydney with $20.”

She remarks that being a curator over 20 years, working with artists and also being an artist herself, put her on a similar level, and enables her to see in someone’s work whether they’ve studied at a particular college or have been self-taught;

“…which is not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s actually good. And then there are the ones that have gone through institutions; as with any field of education, you are going to be marked by that and it’s sometimes hard to break out of that. Even working as an art curator, people are comparing your work with others; “Oh your work is just like Peter Booth…Oh, this looks just like that.” But I’ve always had to contain myself from making such comments to the person who’s making the art because can be really dehumanising. Of course I’d like to say I wasn’t influenced by anyone, but obviously if you look at my work, I am influenced. ”

Sasha Grishin reviewing Higginbotham’s 22 etchings and linocuts at Bitumen River Gallery, Manuka, ACT, in the Canberra Times, 30 July 1983, p.17  remarks that the “exhibition brings with it all the angst, sarcasm and expressionistic frenzy of the Melbourne art scene.” No doubt he was referring to the sort of work found at Iceberg and the more recently opened Roar Studios directed by Prahran graduate David Larwill, who made its manifesto “art from the heart.” Julie’s show attacked social inequities of what she identified as the “capitalist patriarchal system” and exposed injustices of Australian urban society, arguing, Grishin wrote, “that the time for toleration has passed and now is the time to fight.” Noting the works’ “cartoon-strip-like directness” he reports her statement that “titles are important to the understanding of the image and often it is the title that arises first,” and cites a sample of titles like Money rules OK; and Working as an artist I feel out of place in the business world or For every businessman the shadow of death follows close behind.

Higginbotham, then employed at the VCA as a printmaking technician, got back into printmaking, for which her camera was just a tool. Meanwhile she was still taking portraits of people, but for them rather than for herself.

She worked with Brunswick Council’s Music Festival, and in 1989 set up an exhibition of local artists, after which she spent ten years as a council contractor, and established the Mechanics Institute Gallery curating and co-ordinating 84 exhibitions over nine years. That became the Counihan gallery, and once that was created, she left, deciding to do something completely different and went and worked at Besterwitch Motors in Brunswick as an apprentice motor mechanic. Following that she went  to care for her mother in Point Lonsdale. There she became a committee member for the Arts program of the Queenscliff Council. Over six months she photographed the citizens of Queenscliffe in colour, and that was exhibited. After leaving Point Lonsdale she moved to Castlemaine where she has been since for over 20 years, and in which she has found a “huge artists’ colony”;. That became the Counihan gallery, and once that was created, she left to care for her mother in Point Lonsdale. There she became a committee member for the Arts program of the Queenscliff Council. Over six months she photographed the citizens of Queenscliff in colour, and that was exhibited. After leaving Point Lonsdale she moved to Castlemaine where she has been since for over 20 years, and in which she has found a “huge artists’ colony”;

“I’m retired, a hermit, but it’s all still going on here and it’s actually fabulous with amazing stuff being being done here, in Castlemaine and surrounding communites. Being an artist is to be amongst a small minority, but I’m glad I chose to be one, to have had that training and getting introduced to bohemia. I couldn’t have had a better life, maybe more so without pain, but my life was so interesting because I could communicate to people because I’m out there—that’s what I’m doing—I’m making art. It doesn’t have to be photography. It all goes back to when you chose to be an artist. To choose to be an artist is a difficult road to take, but it’s very rewarding and a lot of people don’t understand what you’re doing. I’m learning. I’m still learning every day, and photography helps you do that too. It’s a tool to meet people, and people are very important to me; even though I live as a hermit I meet people through taking photographs.

On her life’s body of work in photography, and on continuing to make art, Julie remarks;

“I believe the photographs that I took in the 70s are very strong images, a social document, because I chose to make portraits and mixed with lots of interesting folk. I think now is a really good time to show those images, which are almost 50 years old. I’m proud of what I’ve done, but they’ve been in the closet for so long, I think that it’s time they came out. The portraits and street photographs reflect that time in the 70s that comes from that training in a European sensibility…like Brassai… you know, jump out and get the photograph, catch that image!”

“I look back at my gypsy lifestyle and feel blessed with the Mirka magic…as the Romani say: you cannot walk straight when the road is bent!

“As you’re getting older your head is so full of images so that continuing to make your own work and evaluating it is very complex. You just get to the point where you’re comfortable with what you’ve created, and that’s enough, that’s enough.”

NOTE: Julie Higginbotham’s statements quoted here are from this video interview she made with Peter Leiss

NOTE: Julie Higginbotham’s statements quoted here are from a video interview she made with Peter Leiss. The content is from The Alumni: Julie Higginbotham at Prahran Legacy a site I have devoted to my alma mater Prahran College