I was working at the National Museum of Australia in 2000 and Jon was busy reprinting a series of photographs that the Museum was acquiring. This is how we first met. His images of people in Timor, Bondi, Bouganville and elsewhere are a great document of humanity. I interviewed him sitting on the grass in a field next to Antill Street in Dickson, ACT. When I transcribed the tape, the noise of the cars and the wind blowing into the microphone recalls that day clearly. My girlfriend of the time, Peta Hendriks, was also present.

Konrad: When was your first art-making and how did you get into photography?

Jon: I suppose it went back to the Yellow House in the late 60's. I didn't know anything about art. I didn't feel I was particularly gifted. I wanted to get away from an unhappy home life and school life in particular and I suppose I wanted vice and bohemia. So I searched out people that I was attracted to and by default I ended up at the Yellow House. My mother had moved there from the country, that is to Pott's Point and the Yellow House was just up the road. So I became involved with the Yellow House and there were some great people there, Martin Sharp of course was the instigator of it, and Brett Whitely, Peter Wright, Greg Weight and Albie Thoms. Peter Kingston is another one. There were some very, very good people there and they were my peers. There were lots of people who came through and I got interested in it. I started making photographs and I shot film and I was in stage productions and it was fantastic, it was a great eye opener. So I suppose from those days I started getting interested in photography.

How old were you then?

Twenty.

So was this exiting starting to get involved in artmaking and also with the Yellow House?

It was incredibly exciting at that stage. Our's was the drug culture of the sixties and early seventies and there was lots of experimentation. We were a lot younger and a lot sillier perhaps but at the root of it all there was something to be created in that atmosphere. It was my artschool and I learned an enormous amount and from there I sort of puttered on. I borrowed a camera and I just started making photographs. It wasn't till years later that I felt as though I could do anything really good with them. Nonetheless you had to start somewhere, everyone has to start somewhere. I was very lucky to start in that environment, it was a very nurturing environment, very inspirational environment and the mentors that I had there were fantastic and they're still all good friends, the ones that are alive. So that's how I started. It wasn't the typical got a box brownie when I was a kid although I did have a camera as a kid I never was really passionate about photography. Like all kids my attention span lasted for about a week or maybe a month but not much longer. I made surfing photographs as a kid I remember. I became passionate about it during and particularly after the Yellow House. I think personally I'm a late starter with everything. I think I'm just getting it now. At the age of fifty I'm beginning to make good photographs. So I hope I've got another twenty, thirty, forty years still in me.

What is it that draws you to photography? For me looking at your work it seems to be that photography captures something in people that you photograph...

Well, people's the key. It's a way of being included in anything. I don't think I was ever really included in my boyhood life, definitely school life. I don't say that with any great sadness, it's just that I didn't fit in. Photography was a way that I could fit in and make some sort of contribution and feel as though I was doing something, allowed me to hang out. Since those days I've done various things where I've become involved with a community for example Bondi Beach. I can go down to Bondi now and I can see all of my old friends down there and I they give me a beach chair and umbrella to sit under. It's a way of ingratiating oneself into any sort of situation and being able to contribute to that situation. Bondi was something that I really loved because I adored that beach and I think if Australia's got a culture it hasn't got a street culture it's got a beach culture and for me to become a part of the most famous beach in Australia was fantastic. Those photographs I proudly can say still hold up today. They're wonderful documents of an era that is fast closing on Bondi. I spent years trudging up and down that beach in all sorts of weather and all sorts of seasons, mainly summer and got to know the characters and got to know the people and perhaps via just sheer persistence got something down that would've never been gotten if someone didn't spend the time. So Bondi was a way of including myself in that culture.

Do you want to tell me about Greenpeace.

Greenpeace was a way of... I was thinking of trying to make photographs that had some social connotations, images which could work in changing the way people thought about things. I didn't know I'd have to organise Greenpeace to make those photographs. In fact that's what I did. 78 I think it was. We ran a very, very successful campaign. At the time I got photographs published in various magazines. One thing we did with Greenpeace, I got into the whaling station and I photographed the whaling station and then I made postcards of what was in there, in fact a whale being flensed. We got the addresses of all the shareholders and we sent them the postcards through the mail. So photography worked on both the publication level and it worked on a grass roots level, fantastically. And I did collages. I put the head of the whaling station over a dead whale, etc and got into all sorts of trouble . That particular collage was published on the front of a magazine and there was a death threat made against the whaling station owners and the police came looking for me because of the collage, real bright.

 So that was a wonderful experience. That campaign I think was probably the catalyst to stop whaling in Australia. That whaling station in Western Australia was the last whaling station of its kind in this country. The last English speaking whaling station in the world. I went back there in 92 and there was a museum there, which was good but no mention of the radical Greenpeacers who stirred it all up and got front page news. Nonetheless they've stopped killing whales. Now whales are seen as a commodity for the tourist industry. I don't know whether that's all that good in itself but at least they're not killing them. Very exciting times, very exiting times and I was the photographer, made lots and lots of photographs. I must find them, that's the trouble with photography. Maybe with all the new technology, with computers and stuff I'll be able to make a CD and get all these old Greenpeace photographs together somehow.

So what happened after Greenpeace?

I went to Central Australia. I've always been fascinated by aboriginal people. Made a big portfolio up there, that would have been late 70's. That was fantastic. Going to Central Australia was great. I hitch hiked, can't believe I did it but I hitch-hiked most of the way and came back with absolutely nothing but a whole bunch of photographs.

Peta: What were you interested in with aboriginal people.

I think it's just a different way of thinking. I still don't know what it is. People who come from an oral tradition have a completely different way of interpreting the world than we do and if you start exploring it it's just so extraordinary this way of understanding place wand your place in place.

Peta: How did they feel about being photographed. 

They were pretty good. I always trust people or I understand the situation well enough to know that it's okay to photograph, that comes with experience. For example you wouldn't photograph in and around camps but the moment you were out hunting kangaroos or going for a drive that seemed to be the time.

There are idiots, for example a photographer who will remain nameless went through Docker River a couple of months before I got up there and of course I just didn't take the camera out because photographers had a very bad name because this fella didn't respect the culture and photographed ceremonies that he shouldn't have photographed. So always you battle with photographers who think that they have a right to photograph anything and those people I've got no time for and they ruin it for other people. You have to respect the culture you're photographing otherwise you don't get good photographs. I've always tried to understand the culture and respect people's feelings. Most people I don't have any problem with and the reason is I ask, I try to be courteous and I try to understand the culture. Language of course is a very good thing to have and it's another thing that I really work hard at even if it's a few words or a few phrases, it shows people that you're making an attempt to try and communicate in their first language and that's always a great joy.

 Konrad: I think it's also something people from our culture expect the other culture to do.

 Well there is a certain kind of thing about "well why don't they speak English." and that could almost be construed as racist or at least bigoted. It's terrible. 

 I think there's a tendency in your work and I don't want to use the word humble but there's not an arrogance there. 

 With photographing people I don't want anything from people . If there is something that I do want it's just for people to be so I just try to accept everybody and situations as best I can and just roll with the flow. I don't judge. At Bondi once I was walking along the beach and there was a paraplegic sitting on a rock and his lower torso was shrivelled away and he had these tiny little skinny legs and obviously someone had picked him up and placed him on the rock so he could be by the sea and I just said "Can I do a photo mate"

 "Yeh sure"

 Click,click. 

 I said "thank's mate" 

 "Ah no problems"

 I walked up the stairs behind him at the north end of Bondi and a woman came up to me and said "what did you do that for?"

 I didn't know. I said "he was there, he looked different and I did the photo"

 She said "you don't know what you've done"

  I said"well what have I done?"

 She said "You've made his day because everybody doesn't look at him and not only you looked at him but you made a photo of him."

 And indeed when that photo was exhibited there were a lot of people who said "Oh, how could you photograph that?" and they were the very people who wouldn't look at him on the beach.   So you learn stuff, well what is it to look human, this fellow was as human as anybody else. And he seemed a nice bloke for the few moments that I was with him.

 That's another thing I find in your work is the enjoyment of all sorts of people.

 Yeah, well we're all here aren't we. We're all trying to do our thing and make a go of it and live our lives and be happy and we're all people and we're all bloody hopeless and we're all going through shit.

 I think photography lends itself to people very well. I think it's a good medium for people. I don't think there's any other medium that really comes close to it in a way.

 It's a good way of capturing an instant that painting can't do really

 Yeah, painting does it in a different way.

 It can do it but if you're doing it from life no one can really be themselves if they're sitting for you.

 Well someone like... who was it. He painted people over years, he was good. You hit the nail on the head as far as life is concerned, doing things from life. I get very bitchy about the way photography has gone in Australia in the last 20 years. There seems to be an enormous distrust over sensorious experience. That's a quote that I found in a book that I'm reading at the moment by a fellow called Abram. The enormous distrust over senorous experience while valorising ideas which hide behind or beyond sensual experience. Meaning that so much of photography and indeed art is to do with ideas and that's what's being valorised, that's what's being the grant's and the money etc. There are people who use art to experience something new, I mean directly which photography can do so well. They're not considered to be artists or photographers and that's a terrible, terrible thing. It's got so much to do with the mind and nothing to do with the heart and intuition and those sorts of things. I'm very distrustful of the mind in a strange way. I'm not an intellectual, I hate intellectuals. Great art, you don't have to know intellectually what you're looking at. If it feels good or if it talks to you or as Robert Hughes said if you look at something that's "radiant with consciousness" that's a wonderful thing. Now that doesn't mean you understand what you're looking at. Possibly just the contrary. If something is radiant with consciousness that's enough but these days everything's got to be explained and organised.

 Often I find that the better the work the harder it is to quantify it. You can explain so much but there's always shady bits that you can't explain. And it shifts from individual to individual in their perceptions.

 Yeah. The experience of Timor or indeed any of the other things that I've tried to do have been fantastic because you learn so much. Going to Timor I had to start right from scratch again. I didn't know the Timorese, I didn't know the foreigners, I didn't know the situation, I definitely didn't know the language, I didn't know the culture, so all of a sudden a year later I've learnt lot's of stuff. It's amazing, you just keep on learning. I had a show in 99, just before I went to Timor. I'd just gone bush with no people and there again I learned stuff. I walked and walked for years and I did special walks and I got lost. I had fantastic adventures just trying to understand what it is about the Australian bush that is so powerful and to see beyond the classicism of it or the tradition of it and trying to see the mythological which is indeed the way Aboriginal people read the bush. So that experiment was trying to read the bush in mythical terms which I found wonderful to do. To see faces and spirits in rocks and trees and water and things. Those sensoral experiences are very very important for people to have in order to grow, to make their life new, to keep renewing your journey through life. I'm always trying to take the camera and learn through what I photograph. I don't know that I've got a good photograph. I'm too involved with the experience in the moment to even think clearly. I'm trying to be a part of what is happening, to try and understand what is happening. To go into a situation to make a great photograph, I don't even think like that, it's not on the agenda. All I do is keep making photographs. Sometimes it's months later that I look at proofsheets and I think 'My God how did that happen, where did that come from.' There's a great surprise and joy in discovering what I've done. I'm scanning them trying to work out whether it's talking to me or not. So to that end, I don't know what I'm doing, all I know is that I've got to keep photographing. The technical stuff, after 30 years, you do anything for over 30 years you gotta get the technique down, that's just normal. The technical stuff, it's really boring.  You learn that by rote. You learn that by doing it over and over and over again. Then you can just play. Then you can make photographs and you enjoy making photographs and people respond to your enjoyment at making photographs and want to be a part of that thing, sometimes. I'm very, very lucky. My life's been blessed. I've found something that I can talk with. It's been everything for me. It's given me fantastic adventures. Things that I haven't planned most of the time but nonetheless fantastic adventures.  

 So is it a drive to shoot all of the time?

 I suppose at the moment I've done very little photography since I've got back. I've done three or four rolls. I was pretty exhausted when I got back. I've been in the darkroom all the time so I haven't had much opportunity to make photographs. It's just trying to consolidate the ten months that I've been photographing. So, to that end of course I'm driven. It's what I love to do. I wrestle with it and I get frustrated with it and I get pissed off with it and it's hard to do at times but it's the one thing that I just do. I don't know anything else. I don't think I could turn around and be a painter or a film maker or a sculptor. As luck has it that's what I've been saddled with.

 Have you attempted other mediums?

 I suppose every now and then I think about documentary film. I think I'm just too overwhelmed to keep the photography going to try that. And that requires a lot more money. Although in Timor I used a little Digicam camera and it's fascinating the concentration you have to have with that. So it was fun but I'm a little insecure about it. I think I'll stick to the thing that I know best rather than biting off any more than I can...it's too much to chew as it is. I appreciate other mediums, I adore film and I adore painting. I've got friends from all different disciplines and I adore what they do but I think I've got to stick to photography, keep chipping away. Maybe at the end of the day there'll be a portfolio that will be some contribution to culture and history long after I'm dead and gone. Maybe a little bit of what I do will rub against some young person.

 Inspiration is a wonderful thing. It's very interesting when you teach photography because you ask students why did you want to do photography and invariably what I've found is that most people have seen some photograph that's turned them on and they want to  make something like that. They mightn't even know the name of the photographer or it might be very obscure but generally speaking they don't want to make photography because it's the in thing to do, they've had an experience with a photograph that's talked to them and they want to try and do the same.

  I've been nurtured enormously by the great photographers or the photographers I've loved over the years from Max Dupain to Olive Cotton to Robert Frank, the list goes on and on. All of them have made some great contribution. I suppose what I'm trying to do is a combination of all of them, something about all of them that I've picked up on or loved or been able to see the world a little bit differently or whatever. I think it's very important for students to be vulnerable to great photographers, seek them out and try and understand what they did and pick up the baton and run their race with it, a race that no one ever wins but nonetheless runs. That's where postmodernism, so called, I find very sickening because it's almost like nothing ever happened before like we're inventing the wheel. The wheel's been around for a long time and great photography's been around a long time. If you can't appreciate it or love it, it's sad really.

 Is there ever times in your work where you get into situations where you're fearful for your life. 

 Not really. The times that have been the most hairy, you're just working so quickly to get stuff down that you're not thinking of the danger but I have been in situations where I've been very upset and it happened last year in Timor. There was a time that I've got no photographs from or no photograsphs I've printed up, where this young Bangladeshi soldier was blown up by a mine. I just happened to be in the ambulance when it reached the Bangledeshi truck. He died in front of me. That was upsetting. That had me shaking. There was nothing frightening about it. It's sort of strange where observing it was harder than being in a riot with knives and things. One was very literal in that you had to be on your toes and get out of the way the other one you were hopeless, you couldn't do anything and maybe that's the difference. When you're on your toes and photographing and there's a riot and guns and people screaming and shouting and crowds, you're working on your wits, you have to move very, very fast and know what you're doing. Fortunately that situation was quite under control. The situation that wasn't under control was this guy who was blown up and he was just lying there gurgling and they were trying to find veins and they were trying to give him oxygen. It was just terribly sad you know, the wrestle to keep this keep this guy alive. The ambulance driver was a really great bloke, he'd seen a lot, one of those paramedics. He'd been in Rwanda. Alan was his name. To see him in operation, I was humbled. He had to take control. You had this guy in the back of a truck, you had one Bangladeshi holding his face together with a bloody rag, they had to get him out of the truck, into the ambulance, they had to administer first aid, they had to get him down to the military hospital. Seeing this guy get in, just had to say, 'right you guys, out of here, you move over here, you help here, you find a vein, you get the oxygen here, bring the body, take it slowly.' You know, he just took controll of the situation. In amongst all  these commands, 'we're losing him' just under his breath 'we lost him.' I was like that [shaking]. It wasn't because of the death. It was the hopelessness I felt. I could photograph, I could help them get the ambulance round, I just stood out on the road, made sure they didn't go over a cliff on a narrow little road but I couldn't do much more. With the militia you felt more in control I suppose.

 I didn't know I was a little bit in shock I suppose. At the end of the day I came back and there was a lot of talk about this, all the flags were at half mast, and we saw all the Bangladeshi military come in and they talked to us and the ambulance drivers, they've got to clean out the ambulance of all the blood, it was a long kind of thing. I remember that evening talking to a few people about it and Juan Federa, the CEO of Timor Aid, just came up and gave me a bit of a hug which was very, very sweet of him, I'll never forget it. But the ambulance guys they delivered a baby that night, I mean life and death in one day. 

  The thing that I found so depressing about Timor was that there were no photographers there for the long haul. The jounalistic type photographers I'm very cynical about. For me it's just not the money shot. It's just not that. It's a whole lot of different things that make up this country and these people and what they've gone through. It's off the map now, it's not news, they can't sell papers with Timor. That's what it boils down to and that's a tradgedy and that just shows you how shallow the media is.

There was a day there when they had the commemoration of Falintil and it was the day in which Xanana Gusmao was handing over his commandership to the new commander. All of a sudden the press came to Dili. I found myself on probably the second or third occasion surrounded by other photograpoohers and film makers. They're all running this way and they're pushing past me. I felt so ashamed because they were behaving so badly and the Timorese were saying to me that they were behaving badly. I felt really bad. In a strange way when I saw them working I thought I should do that too. That lasted for about ten minutes. The thing was I knew that one the light was no good, it was very hard light, two; it was all organized sort of stuff and three I knew that if I was patient enough the light would come good and I would get better photographs. At about three o'clock after all the formalities were over all the journalists disappeared. At about four o'clock things were really beginning to cook up. A little bit of rice wine came out and people started dancing and there were people singing. All of a sudden, no press, light's getting good, I'm really enjoying myself, doing a few photos, dancing with the people etc. And I get with a group of Falintil fighters, these young guys. I was joking around, taking a few photos and one bloke I knew fairly well and we were mucking around, it was really great. And I'm the only [photographer] there! We're having a really good time. In the midst of this two Falintil soldiers grab me by the arm and drag me into the dance. It's a dance they do in a big circle. So there's these two guys with their guns and me with my camera, camera's bouncing and the guns were bouncing. It ended, I said thanks. Not only did I get the good photos, they weren't the official photos, but what rounded the whole day for me was being pulled into the dance to dance with these guys. So you go away feeling good. I made some deep wonderful connection and that's going to go back there with the photo. It was just such a really powerful day.    

 I find the shots of the kids who would have been through hell, there's still a lot of joy. They're still kids and that amazes me.

 Oh the kids are gorgious. Once you speak the language you send them up and you take the piss out of them and they take the piss out of you, they're cheeky little bastards. I always have a lot of fun with the kids.

 What do you see in the near future and in the far future for you? Plans?

 I don't know yet. Near future I go back to Timor, next month. I got a phonecall from a Timorese friend of mine today "where are you, you bastard" I'm very interested in the whole area, have been for years. I've done a lot of work in Indonesia before. There's a part of me that is interested in those troubled spots. Whether it's a good idea to work there and whether I can is debateable. There's also the Aboriginal work. I think about it every now and then. I wouldn't mind going back to Arnham land for at least six months of the year for a couple of years cause I've got friends up there. I've had months at a time but I've never had six months. I'd like to do more work up there. The Aboriginal thing is the most important thing for this country, somehow rectifying what has happened and moving on, somehow trying to facilitate the dignity of other people. It would be good to have those first Australians on their feet and happy with their lot and their country. I suppose it comes down to understanding and I suppose maybe there's a small part to play with photographs. I'd love to spend more time up there. I wouldn't mind going and photographing the bush too. Everything I've ever done I haven't felt like I've finished because I mean I could have stuck with Bondi and I could have just photographed it over and over again but I get  little bit bored I suppose or I get too exhausted by as subject and I want to move on. Most of these things I've fallen into. I haven't really set out to do anything specific. I just seem to get caught up. I've photographed indigenous people a lot all over Australia but it might be nice now to focus in one particular area, a group of people or a community, I don't know. All I do know is that I've got to go back up there to timor and play that out. At least it will be a documentation from liberation to election and that's a pretty historic time for a country like East Timor. I've got too many friends up there now and I have to go back. I have to go back and find out what all that is and keep going and we'll see what happens after that.