William 'Billy' Russell 1933 - 2003

William Russell was a press photographer who worked in Fleet Street in the 1960s and who helped to establish high levels of respect for Australians as journalists and photographers. In the 1960s, Fleet Street was a mecca for newspaper workers from across the world, particularly Commonwealth countries. But in 1959-60 it was shrinking. Two morning dailies, the Sketch and the Chronicle, had folded, journalists and photographers used to the street's lavish expenses and high salaries were roughing it on the provincials or lowly paid local agencies, and many were out of work.

It was into this environment that Russell, who had virtually no previous experience in newspapers, landed in London with his wife Daphne, nicely tanned from three months in Spain. His CV was hardly convincing: born in Sydney in 1933, he left Randwick Boys High aged 15 in 1947, departed home in Bronte a year later, was briefly a copyboy on the Sydney Daily Telegraph and a gofer for Cinesound. Desperate to get overseas, he was a cadet merchant seaman on tankers plying the Arabian Gulf, jumping ship in 1952 in Rotterdam. He worked a number of menial jobs in London for two years and eventually returned to Australian in 1954 in pursuit of money. He drove trucks for the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme and the Sydney Water Board. Having earned enough, he married and headed overseas again, determined this time not to be rebuffed.

At the age of twenty-seven, Russell was not entirely without photographic credentials: he had worked as a street photographer in Sydney, confronting tourists in Martin Place, snapping their picture, then cajoling them into buying the print. It needed an up-front but genial approach. But he was also well equipped with audacity and ‘quick intelligence’ and both served him well in this role and throughout the course of his life as a newspaper photographer, documentary director and producer and film scriptwriter.

He was also intellectually aggressive, honed in arguments with the free-thinking radicals of the famous Sydney Push. And he had pedigree: his uncles Dan and Jim Russell were well-known newspaper cartoonists and illustrators. Jim wrote and drew the still popular syndicated strip ‘The Potts’ from the 1930s until his death in 2002 at the age of 90.

In Spain, Russell had shot photographs of such quality and interest he got a job as a freelance on the now-defunct United Press International, then rivalling Associated Press as the biggest newsagency in the world. After a year, he went to the front desk of London's Daily Telegraph and, refused admittance, sent upstairs a folio of his agency photographs that the paper had published. He got the job.

Colour photography in newspapers was in its infancy and, having bypassed the black-and-white Speed Graphic for a Leica, Billy was eventually assigned to the Telegraph's weekly liftout colour magazine, which used the most talented writers and photographers.

Russell prospered and travelled widely. But by 1969 their son William needed stability and the Russells returned to Australia, where William Snr. joined the staff of News Limited, working first on the Daily Mirror, then the short-lived but Sunday Australian. Apart from a year back in Fleet Street with the Daily Telegraph, he spent the rest of his newspaper career at News Limited, forsaking the road for a desk job until he retired in 1992. He made the move indoors because it guaranteed him night work -- and he had found new goals to pursue.

In London, Russell had gone to night school to learn movie making. He caught the bug, and in 1974-75 co-produced, co-directed and photographed a TV documentary about Australian hang-gliders. Birdman was acclaimed and achieved record overseas sales for the time. But he was restless again. Working in the daytime from the dilapidated offices of a '40s dental mechanic in Woollahra, he wrote the original script for the movie Frenchman's Farm and, after a relentless pursuit of producers, saw it on the screens in 1987, starring John Meillon and Ray Barrett.

Russell wrote several other scripts. Hollywood producers refuse to deal with writers. They deal with agents, who take 10 per cent, or other producers. Russell solved the problem by introducing himself as the producer of Galaxy Films. He had the chutzpah and knowledge to pull it off, and soon was in regular contact with Hollywood's second-string production companies, the Mini-Majors.

Several of his scripts were optioned but not produced. Undeterred, Russell was working on scripts right up to his sudden death from a heart attack at his home in Tuggerah, New South Wales in 2003.

Sources:

• 'Spirit of Inspired Lensman',Australian, 24 July 2003, p. 15.