Sir Les Patterson [Press conference at Rockman’s Regency hotel launching the 1st Melbourne Comedy Festival] 1987/2019

Summary

Melbourne-born photographer Peter Milne was part of the vanguard of emerging musicians and artists from the late 1970s. Counting Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard and Polly Borland among his friends, Milne became an almost accidental documentarian of the formative years of Melbourne’s alternative royalty of performance. The creative milieu in which he thrived was occupied not only by musicians but also by a coterie of brilliant stand-up comedians. Milne says of live comedy that it’s his ‘favourite performative art’, and his huge visual archive pays homage to it.

In 2018, he published ‘Fool’s Paradise’, a tome illustrating the first 11 years of the Melbourne Comedy Festival (1987–98), comprised of just a selection from his photographic archive. In 2019, the Art and Heritage Collection acquired eight of the black-and-white photographs from this early era of what has become a key event on the international comedy circuit. Milne’s visual records of the festival show his talent for carefully balancing candidness with creative intention, often announcing his own particular humour. Rather than focus primarily on the very public stage performances that frame stand-up routines, these photographs reveal the rather more intimate encounters and antics between comedians that occur backstage. They open a window onto the culture of comedy that’s lived by the performers.

This signed limited-edition photograph from 1987 was acquired through purchase for the collection. It shows Sir Les Patterson, the renowned pompous but boorish and offensive character played by Barry Humphries.