Bondi Local Profile | Murray Hilton
Bondi Local Profile | Murray Hilton
Remo first met Murray when he supplied REMO in Darlinghurst with some cool objets d’art back in the late 1980s. Melanie met him soon after when he was working at a mutual friend’s hairdressing salon.
Melanie spoke to Murray about his life and work at his home in North Bondi.
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Hi Murray, can we please get a little bit of your background.
I was born in central Queensland, in a little town called Chinchilla, on the Maranoa, off the Darling Downs. It’s flatland and has a lot of agriculture: sheep, cattle, wheat, sorghum. It could grow grapes. Frosty mornings and cool evenings and hot during the day. My father was the town doctor. My mum was a nurse when she moved out there. She made herself busy having children. There’s five in my family. Seven births, five to fruition and a couple of stillborns. She died when I was aged four. She went back to Brisbane to do a refresher course with my grandmother and both of them were caught in a fire. My mother went in to save my grandmother who survived but my mother didn’t.
Three years later my father remarried an English/Irish lady who he met in Fiji on his first holiday after my mother’s death. She was on a working holiday from New York. She used to work for Ford Motor Company. And they fell in love and had a little two week fling and then carried on the romance Par Avion – airmail letters and little secret parcels and packages! My father lied to us and told us he’d fallen in love with a Fijian woman. We hid under the bed when Joyce finally arrived only to be horrified that she had freckles and a blond bob! She was at the front door waiting for these five children and we were all under the bed! It was quite hilarious actually. She was all liberal and wanted us to walk around the house in the nude and stuff! She moved back to Chinchilla with us and we had a great time with her even though it was difficult at first to accept a new woman into the family. Dad needed the help. He had completely immersed himself in his work. It’s all fair in love and war. We all had different ways. We siblings forged very strong family ties because we had lost our mum and to this day we are like best friends as well as brothers and sisters.
Where are all your brothers and sisters?
The sister just above me lives in Lilyfield, has a Swedish partner and one child Max, who’s now 11 and a very good runner. He just came third in the 400m nationals. The sister above that works at Queensland University in the Humanities faculty and she’s a conscientious Buddhist and works in monasteries in Nepal for 3 months a year teaching the little monk boys English. The brother above that – there’s quite a big gap there – has lived most of his adult life in Vietnam, working for Deacons. He married a Japanese woman with one child. He is now retired and is living on Stradbroke Island which is where we all celebrate Christmas every year. And the brother above that now lives in Byron Bay, but he lived in Darwin before that. He teaches multi-media, he’s a musician and he does web design.
So you’re the baby!
Yeah! And I’m a part-time waiter up at North Bondi at a place called Jo and Willy’s Depot and I do fine art photography now which is an evolution from originally collage, and resting in the middle on photographic mixed media using a lot of synthetic materials and digital print until finally evolving to just pure photography.
Can we go back to the vinyl media. There was a photograph that you had worked on down in Sean’s [Panaroma]. Is that still there?
Yeah, the boys jumping off the sand dunes? Yes, that’s still there. That’s an old family photograph that my father took of us children growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s on the Gold Coast and rural Queensland. He wasn’t a photographer but he had been given a Kodak Retina, a standard issue, when the airforce were taking aerial photographs from the planes and he got that when he left his service and used that throughout our childhood and Super 8 to document us kids growing up. When we all decided to travel overseas we were given that camera. It’s what we learnt on. Completely manual, a beautiful piece of machinery but you needed a light metre and it took a long time to set up a shot, but a beautiful camera, with a Carl Zeiss lens. The quality of all those works, that genre of my works, has also been shown at Collette in Paris, is the fact that it’s got a kodachrome colour profile which is one of the most endearing things and it’s basically just a photograph of kids that are young and free. Footloose!
It’s a beautiful photograph and what you’ve done with it …
Youthful enthusiasm and I’ve given it a bit of a modern surface. It’s gained a bit of a patina, it’s yellowed and tarnished a bit over the years which has added to its 1950’s charm. But it’s got a two part epoxy resin with a fibreglass piece that has a slightly sculptural surface that shows the kinetics of the way the boys are jumping through the air. But yeah, that piece is there and also some other ones from that vintage of my work. It’s always been quite popular, because of the subject matter. Everyone who has grown up in the 50’s and 60’s can relate to those images because they have similar images. We’ve all got photos like that in our photo albums.
The exhibition of yours that we saw over in Potts Point a few months ago, that was a different camera obviously …
Completely. That was my Canon EOS 60 and I’ve got quite a good complement of professional lenses now, and I’m completely kitted out in the photographic gear. Whenever I travel I take all that gear with me because I love to take photographs.
It’s [that exhibition] figurative works from the north of India. Mainly from Rajasthan, and also from Varanasi and Kashmir, Sriniga where I was staying on the houseboats on the lakes. Some of the most beautiful parts of India. Mainly I concentrated on the people because I had never done figurative work before, but I found them all so ultimately fascinating! Even trying to capture the women clandestinely because they will never really want to pose for a photograph. I needed to digitally decorate them because the raw material was quite beautiful but I could never really get a full-face shot. But the men were completely different. They were only too happy to smile for a camera and they are the most beautiful open souls. The women are completely beautiful in their own way but you don’t get to see that. It’s all behind closed doors.
It was a beautiful exhibition.
Why did you come to Bondi?
I was very good friends with Sean Moran. He was one of my earliest collectors from when I was exhibiting in Mary Place and doing collages and covering them with resin. He bought a couple of very early pieces and we started up a friendship from then, he and his partner Michael. And I remember visiting when they had a place on Brighton Boulevard. They had a great little place with a backyard and a clothesline and I always remember going over and sitting out in the sun in Bondi. At that time I was living in Darlinghurst and I remember saying to them to please keep your eye out for a semi, something like theirs with a backyard and a garage that I could turn into a studio, and a clothesline and some lawn. A year later they phoned me and said they hadn’t found that place but that a flat upstairs from the restaurant had become available. They said to come and have a look coz they thought I’d like the view. So I did and saw the potential in it, and the view is incredible, so I took it. I renovated it and during that time my sister was needing a place. She had partnered up and was wanting to have a child. The apartment on the top floor was available so they moved in there and stayed until their baby was one when it became too hard so they moved out and I moved in to her place [where I still am!] So I’ve been in this building for 16 years, 10 years in this apartment.
It’s a great building …
It is. It’s riddled with architectural faults of course. All the pointing’s gone. But it’s the same as all Bondi apartments. They’re slowly getting attention now. The woman who owns this building has started spending money on getting it fixed but I doubt it will be completed before she goes. She’ll hand it down to her children and they’ll either put money into it or they’ll sell it to a developer because it’s probably one of the most prime pieces of land. They could erect a 7 or 8 story block of flats and make loads of coin out of it, I’m sure.
Let’s hope not. We’ve got to keep some of these old character buildings.
Yes they do, like what they’ve done with Lurline. They’ve spent a lot of money on some of these buildings – it’s so worth it, otherwise we’re denuding the place of any sort of character. Keep a lot of it.
A lot of people diss the architecture here but in actual fact it’s its endearing charm. It’s a bit like the Art Deco architecture on South Beach, Miami on a much smaller scale. Admittedly if you look at why it was built, it was built because there was a huge population influx. The working class needed somewhere to live. The city was exploding so they built a new suburb that was Bondi Beach. It was never meant to be somewhere prestigious to live. The builders had no regard for the architecture or the environment. The blocks were built off old English plans, but that’s why it’s funky and that’s why people love it. It is the Bondi story.
Like, they are going to be renovating the Pavilion. I just hope they do a good job of that and don’t strip it of all the great bits that are there. People are being up in arms about it and overly cautious and I don’t blame them because it’s one of the few iconic buildings that we’ve got. It’s also one of the most visited places in Australia, Bondi Beach. So they should be spending on it [the Pavilion].
I’m excited about what they’re doing with all the pathways leading to the Pavilion. The reason they’re doing it is now they’ve redone the Swiss Grand, the people that spent all those billions of dollars renovating that have said “we need you to change a lot of the dynamics about they way people use the Bondi foreshore, the Pavilion and us” because for years there were all those tour buses in front of it that just clunked everything up and made it all ugly and so it never worked. Whereas now they’re wanting to direct a lot of the foot traffic down through the back of Bondi Pavilion. The main entrance will now be through what is currently that big arched roller door. They’ll open up the back of the Pavilion. They’re going to make proper bathrooms, showers and they’ll fix it up completely.
I do worry about the amount of private business that’s going in upstairs. But we’ll see …
So now you’re living in Bondi, besides Will and Tony’s …
Will and Jo! And there’s no such people anyway. When people come in and ask where Will and Toby are I say “nowhere, but Heather and Murray are here! You’ll be waiting a while if you want Joey to cook you you’re breakfast!”
Besides there, where do you and Derek like to eat?
There’s lots of places. We don’t really go out to drink. If we’re going to drink we might get a carton of Tamburlaine Organic wine and have some here. We don’t mind Bucket List every now and again. We love Sean’s Panaroma, but we get treated like family there so that’s a given. I do like Paradise [Diner] occasionally. I like Bondi Fish and Bondi’s Best. I love Maurizio’s pizza place down under the Adina, Da Orazio.
So you do move out of your North Bondi nook some times?
Oh yeah, totally! I even went to that pop-up lobster place [Waterman’s Lobster Co] upstairs from Harris Farm, the one that used to be Mr. Moustache. They do lobster rolls that are fabulous and they sell that fabulous beer, Young Henry’s.
What’s the new place that Derek took me too the other day? They do kombucha and it’s on Glenayr just around the corner from Hall Street. There’s the new crepe place and it’s a bit further down from that. It’s called The Nine! It’s really good. Watch out though, they think everyone wants to steal their kombucha bottles and as soon as you’ve poured it into your glass they come over to grab it back! I’ve heard that complaint from everybody. Those waitresses! “It’s OK, I don’t want to steal the bottle!” It’s one thing that they need to be told – “we’re not all bottle thieves here in Bondi!” Apart from that I love, the Italian pizzery place further down on Glenayr – La Piadina – I love La Piadina! One of my favourite places in the world, on the planet! It’s got the most gorgeous Italian charm and I love what they do, the fact that it’s such a limited menu. I love The Republic, the organic bakery. I think they do beautiful stuff. Everything they do.
Earth Food Store. I love the food that they spit out everyday. It’s gorgeous and there’s so much love in that and it’s going to get better when they do the renovations. I’m loving the fact we’ve got Woo-woos Metro [Woolworths Metro] here now. I love Scoop.
I’m into anything that’s an improvement. And I’ve watched this place over the last 15 years blossom. It used to be a nightmare doing any sort of grocery shopping here. Nio and Tony’s was the only option and they had you by the balls unless you got on a bus and went up to Bondi Junction. Funnily enough the more that you get here the more I am about supporting small business and the people who have been here for a long time busting their balls. The bar gets raised as better things come in, so it’s good for everybody.
I hear the fish pie at Brown Sugar Nights is amazing but we’re too lazy to pick up a phone to book and besides we’re usually in bed by 8 and they only open for service at 8.30!
Porch and Parlour. Oh and Macelleria! I’m sorry but that just has it absolutely nailed! I could live in that place! I’m so happy to see a place get so hammered and for someone to get a smart idea and really good food and no frills and not expensive so it’s affordable. And for people to pick up on it and cane it! It gets absolutely slammed! And it’s going to get bigger. You know it’s going to move?
Yes! At the moment it’s 3 minutes away from us and soon it’s going to be 6 minutes away!
Oh the crosses we bare! I know what you mean though. Sometimes I need a carton of milk and I can’t even make it to Nio and Tony’s. “Can’t you call and get them to deliver!” Sometimes I don’t even leave this room on my days off.
Well you do start work at 4:30 in the morning most days!
Is there anything that you’re reading or watching at the moment?
Vera. The English detective show – I love it to bits.
Reading? I don’t do a huge amount of. I do read mainly art books, picture books. There’s one in particular which is my bible – in fact it’s a complete mock-up of the bible, Broomberg and Chanarin’s Holy Bible.
Do you have a motto for life? I feel that you do but I’m wondering if you can articulate it.
Well the motto I have for my work is on my website: “It’s not about what I see but the way I see it.” And I also think you can either make it easy or hard. It’s so easy to make it easy, and fun. I see beauty in everything around me, I really do. I feel like I’m blessed with that. I was born with that and it has made my life so much easier. I don’t look for the ugly. I look for the nice, and it makes a huge difference in my life because it makes everything so much easier and so much more fun, you know?
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Check out some of Murray’s work on his website HERE.
Full interview on SoundCloud below or HERE
