ANNA:
And how did you come to start doing visual work?

PETER:
Visual work…

ANNA:
Because you didn’t go through art school?

PETER:
No, there was no art school. I always liked paintings and then I liked images, and I thought the easiest way to make images was with a camera because all you had to do was focus, set the light meter and press a button. And so, I began to make photographs and then I found John Heartfield, the German anti-Nazi photo-monteur who invented photomontage with George Grosz. And I thought, this combines both photography and graphics or art. I realised I didn’t need to go anywhere to do this. All I need is to go, either take the photograph or go down the op shop and get a magazine, tear it up, re-photograph it, and I’ve got an image. And from that moment I didn’t need any art schooling because I could make photographs and I could make montages or collages and collages as you know are fragments put together. I looked at the world around me and it was all falling apart anyway, and your own family life falls apart inevitably, so working with fragments rather than the complete picture made absolute sense to me.

ANNA:
And you started out using mostly black and white images.

PETER:
Yeah.

ANNA:
But more recently you’ve been using colour.

PETER:
Yeah. It was that thing, because I was conditioned by what I saw, thinking of black and white being real documentary, whether it was in films or in photographs, that notion where the image is not true unless it’s black and white. If I look at a Cartier-Bresson photograph, or a Robert Frank photograph, it’s real. But at the same time if I was looking at a colour photograph, it wasn’t quite right but now as we’ve sort of come some distance and colour photography has come a way then it’s a joy to play with colours. I mean you know that, and how you can make, how you can emphasise colours, or choose a particular colour within an image to carry part of the meaning that you want from an image. But always the only images that pleased me were the ones that told a narrative, that helped a narrative. Some people would use a caption with a photograph. Well, the caption is sometimes not enough. But yeah, that’s how the mixture of text and image came about. But yeah, I mean like the work downstairs in the gallery (in the Reckoning show in The Shop Gallery), you know, it’s not fine art printing perhaps, but it’s a poster, after all.

ANNA:
You mean the images?

PETER:
Yeah, the images. I mean, they know what they are, and they don’t pretend to be what they’re not. You know, it’s not a fine thing that you frame and put on a… behind glass. It’s a statement. And people are always uncomfortable with statements on their walls, I think.

ANNA:
But your early work had a very strong political content.

PETER:
Yeah.

ANNA:
I mean not entirely. I know there are other things that were just amazing moody type of interesting things. But some of your early books like The Wise Electron and Industrial Woman have a really strong thread about working people and exploitation and degradation. I mean you were talking about degradation of the environment a long time ago.

PETER:
That’s right yeah, so the intention of those images downstairs haven’t really changed from their earlier versions, they’re only coloured in now. But you’re right and again I think it’s that thing of growing up migrant in this country and seeing your father working at General Motors Holden and your Mum working in a textile factory, inevitably you pick up what’s good and what’s not, and then I found Hartfield who knew that what was good, what hurt the bad guys most. And on the one hand, I mean you’d know this too, you get sick and tired of fighting lost causes. How many times do I have to, you know, say this, wouldn’t I be better off photographing still life flowers? Wouldn’t I be better off taking a lovely picture of the ocean, you know, something pretty or beautiful? But people fought for our rights to say these things and it’s a betrayal of all that long line of people that have made it possible for us to say these things if you just abandon it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get sick of repeating myself and saying, okay, you’ve had a year of fighting lost causes again, how about doing some gardening now for the next three months and growing some cucumbers and tomatoes. Because I think someone like Heartfield, or Kathe Kollwitz, or George Grosz and those people, Otto Dix, I mean, you verge on madness if you just keep pursuing that pure line all the time.

ANNA:
One thing I’ve noticed about your work, I mean I saw it maybe a couple of years ago now, one of your books in a show at The Australian Gallery in Paddington. It was a big format book. I can’t remember the name of it. It had these amazingly beautiful works in them. The book was amazing, amazing production. I think probably you were collaborating with a book binder to do it. The quality of the paper was incredible. It was a big, large format thing.

PETER:
Yeah. I think it was A Gardener at Midnight.

ANNA:
Yeah, it was just so sumptuous and luscious and also whereas before you didn’t seem to be paying much attention to aesthetic concerns.

PETER:
Yeah, you’re right.

ANNA:
You know your stuff was very kind of disruptive and kind of, ‘in your face’. These ones were, you know, sumptuous and luscious and the use of colour was amazing. It was something quite different from your other books.

PETER:
That’s right. Because with the original books I was still learning how to swim with them, and I didn’t dare go beyond the A4 format for example and it was a period when we could actually publish work ourselves and be refunded by the Whitlam government in the form of a subsidy.

ANNA:
Book Bounty.

PETER:
The Book Bounty. You see we could make those things then. We can’t now.

ANNA:
You can, but you’ve got to pay for it.

PETER:
Well yeah, there are no subsidies for it, because everything’s gone offshore to begin with, and we’ve had a change, a couple of changes of government since.

ANNA:
You print everything in Australia, don’t you?

PETER:
Yeah, yeah, because if it’s not printed here, I can’t see it as it comes off the press and I get panicky. That book that you were talking about was called A Gardener at Midnight; I always imagined Babylon, right? Gardeners would have to work day and night to maintain the gardens at Babylon and then Desert Storm came, and the Americans and Australians and the rest just went in, created that fireworks display and carnage that was meant to impress us. And what happened was that the invading forces took intelligence and oil and the rest they just left, and some was looted as we know, and the library was burnt. The Baghdad library was incredible and had all these treasures, but the fire was so intense and deliberately lit for CNN’s cameras that they melted the marble staircases. So, I read somewhere the books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad and there was a street of bookshops and I thought, what’s happening here? They’re not only invading, but they’re also eliminating culture or they’re trying to. Like… Genghis Khan. It was the same excuse. Genghis probably said, hey hang on, I’m your friend, I’m coming here to help. The same way Blair and Bush said we’re coming to save you from Saddam. And so, I thought I’ve got to make a large book to commemorate the burning of the library in Baghdad. And I’ve kept one aside from the edition of 10, which I intend to donate when the time comes.

ANNA:
So, the State Library, or the National Library should have copies of all your books.

PETER:
They do, but I want to donate this particular one just to say, okay we know what happened, we cry for you, here’s a book that acknowledges your tears.

ANNA:
Yeah. Your most recent book was 2016, Owl Press, Ah, Those Thieving Birds!

PETER:
Yeah. This was an initiative of Helen Nickas.

ANNA:
There aren’t any visuals in that are there?

PETER:
No, it’s purely text. Yeah. I don’t know. What do you think?

ANNA:
I felt parallel to it because Owl Press also published my book called Thinking Process and my book was in a sense, although other people don’t know this, was to do with my grieving for my parents’ deaths. When I read it, it had something of the same impulse in it. You kind of approached the issue from a completely different angle. I approached my issue by sort of focusing on objects and processes and sort of valuing things in an existential sense. You were talking more about, you had this theme of the bird, you know, as though …

PETER:
Yeah, we both end up guarding bones, don’t we really? Guarding the bones of our parents. Is there a deeper theme that runs…

ANNA:
…through the book?

PETER:
Yeah, the last piece as you might remember, it’s about Mum’s shadow being dragged away.

ANNA:
Yes.

PETER:
… is our shadow the only thing that we leave behind? And then that gets carried away by the ravens that live in our streets. But it was a wonderful initiative of Eleni’s and then there were two other people involved, myself and another person on the editorial board and we all, and we decided- Eleni wasn’t aware of the chapbook I don’t think- until I showed her some samples. I said, “Let’s do this, you know it’s got… we can do a lot of them, and the production is fairly straight forward, there’s no fancy dancing around with these and we’ll get a lot of peoples’ work out there.” So yeah, it was really important. She’s done a lot of work in publishing, she’s terrific.

ANNA:
She’s one of the few people that’s producing or has produced bilingual Greek-English texts of living contemporary Australian life.

PETER:
That’s right. Wasn’t there one in three languages as well? Antigone’s book.

ANNA:
Antigone’s book. French, English, Greek. Yes. Amazing. About the influences on you. You’ve spoken a lot about the influences on your visual work. But what about the, I mean you’re an English teacher, so obviously you’re very well versed in literature generally. But what literature of the past has informed your thinking? Or… It’s really interesting what you said about the Iraq war and everything and all that library and….

PETER:
They burned it on purpose; they bused people in to do it. They bused arsonists in.

ANNA:
I really like what you said, especially at the beginning. We’ve talked a lot about your influences in visual art and the things that impressed you and inspired you, but even though you’re an English teacher and you’ve had a whole lifetime of experience with literature, I haven’t asked you what kind of literature really got to you. Or which writers and texts?

PETER:
Yeah, as I said, growing up it was always English ‘boys’ own adventures’, and then as I got older it became the French, in translation, then people like Beckett and Joyce. And eventually I did knock on Greek writers’ doors – Ritsos, Kazantzakis, and listening to Theodorakis as well, how he set lyrics to music.

ANNA:
Ritsos’ lyrics.

PETER:
I think that was the main thing. And Kazantzakis especially was important to me, despite all his faults. And I love him to death, but he’s like a galaktoboureko, so sweet, so full on. That’s why Anthony Quinn was so good in the film Zorba, because he was larger than life too. And I realise all his limitations as a writer, but it was important to know that one of ours was there on that big stage with Mann, with Kafka, with Joyce, with Beckett, and all the others. And that sort of gave me courage to sort of, to think, yeah, I’ll keep looking. Eventually I found all the minor poets in Greece, Gatsos, Sinopoulos, Leivaditis, and the rest of them, that were also important because they drew on that surrealist tradition from France. So, I think the people that most influenced what I write were the big Europeans. I mean I don’t know how you can go past the Flauberts and  Hugo and Zola. Zola put it out there on the line, you know.

ANNA:
We were talking to Antigone (Kefala) a week ago and she was basically saying something very similar, and I had a similar experience you know when I was young, my early reading during my teenage years as well, reading all that French literature. It’s been huge in my life. What about Australian literature? Is there any Australian literature of the past that’s grabbed you?

PETER:
No, we were encouraged to recite Banjo Patterson’s, The Man from Snowy River. pa-pum pa-pum pa-pum. I didn’t know what a snowy river was, I hadn’t seen a brumby, and I certainly didn’t know what a stock whip was or what a colt was, but we had to recite it and we were assessed on it. So apart from that compulsory thing, the only one that kind of interested me a little bit was Lawson, mainly because he was an outsider, he was a drunk and he was I think Swedish or Norwegian, so he wasn’t Australian-born, so he was bringing something here, an outsider’s view that more clearly defines what is here rather than someone who’s been here for 50 years and I think that as I’ve got older that’s the thing that I’ve learned to appreciate – how clearer an outsider’s or a foreigner’s or a stranger’s vision is of a particular culture or a country, than people who grow up here or are a part of this culture.

ANNA:
What about people like Slessor? Slessor was a Jewish person.

PETER:
Yeah, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that Five Bells were ringing in a Jewish man’s head. But I guess if one poem has a right to be seen as the Australian definition of a Modernist poem, in say the way The Wasteland or Prufrock is in English and American, it is Five Bells. But I don’t go back to it, but I will go back to all the others, to Pound, to Eliot, to Joyce, to Beckett, to Kazantzakis, to Mann, to Rilke.

ANNA:
How about the Australian novelists, you know, like Christina Stead, Patrick White…?

PETER:
Yeah, White was really important to me as well. Because…

ANNA:
He has that surrealist element.

PETER:
He did, and he also had that Greek connection with Manoli (his partner, Manoli Lascaris). He also selected that book that I left with Yanni, the Three Cheers for Civilisation, as one of his three favourite books of one year in The Age newspaper. That was really sweet. Yeah, I was always trying to deliver stuff to his door after that in Centennial Park. Yeah, Patrick White did it too, especially with Voss and The Tree of Man. But then again, he had to go over there and be with a Greek man to be able to write that stuff. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t gone outside Australia and he hadn’t partnered with a Greek man, I don’t think. Christina Stead, yeah. But again, did she not leave the country? Yeah, again.

ANNA:
Away for most of her life.

PETER:
Yeah. That tells you something doesn’t it?

ANNA:
What about the leftist novelists like Judah Waten and Dorothy Hewett, the social realist writers?

PETER:
Yeah, I think I kind of grew up with them.

ANNA:
A strong Melbourne thing…

PETER:
Yeah and also, I mean all those immigrant German and Jewish painters and writers. Counihan was another one. It was almost like because I was living at the same time, I could ignore them a bit. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but like we were on the same side, kind of thing, we were in the same team.

ANNA:
You already know that…

PETER:
Yeah, Alien Son. I read it but it didn’t make a deep impression on me in the way that a Kazantzakis novel would, such as The Fratricides about the Civil War. I mean, I went to Greek school for six years and I know the teachers weren’t really teachers, they were factory workers and that’s fine, because you got something anyway, but not once was the civil war ever mentioned and it wasn’t until I started watching Angelopoulos’ films and reading Kazantzakis’ The Fratricides that I realized how deep that war has gone and we talk about the Spanish Civil War and that’s not resolved and we talk about the Greek Civil War – that’s not resolved. We talk about the Rwandan civil war – that’s not resolved so those things are alive, but they weren’t taught.

ANNA:
And also, about the invasion of Australia, about the indigenous people, that wasn’t being taught.

PETER:
Thank you, Yanni. Thank you, Anna.

ANNA:
You’ve given us so much food for thought.