He flipped a company car on his first day working at Brisbane’s Courier Mail, drove another into a ditch whilst hanging out the window attempting to take the tell-all shot of an unfolding crime case, and famously found himself photographing a prime minister in bed, but the most audacious manoeuvre Bruce Postle ever pulled in the name of work was pressing a crisp $20 note into the palm of a nurse at Adelaide’s Memorial hospital on Christmas Day in 1976.
Only moments earlier Postle had arrived there in a cab whose driver had been instructed to take him to every hospital in the city until he found the right one. Dozens of press photographers were already scrummed at the door in the hope of catching a glimpse of Australia’s tearaway paceman, Jeff Thomson, who had just been carted away from the Test against Pakistan with a broken collarbone after he cannoned into team-mate Alan Turner in a return catch attempt gone wrong.
Noting the slim odds of getting anything of value by sticking with the pack, the veteran photographer legged it to a rear entrance and with his financial inducement accepted, was ushered straight to door of Thomson’s room. Groggily swaying in his hospital gown, Thomson was about to provide Postle with the pictorial exclusive of the summer.
All this after Postle had captured four frames of the incident itself. Remarkably, it was the only delivery of the day’s play that he had chosen to shoot. But why that delivery? A veteran’s intuition? Postle can’t explain it himself and modestly dismisses it as luck.
‘He asked me what the hell I was doing. He was groggy, god yeah’
By that day in 1976, Bruce Postle’s legend was already well cemented in Australian journalistic circles. “As a reporter, to go out on a job with Postle carried the whiff of danger,” Les Carlyon once wrote. “It also carried the chance that Postle would make you famous for a day, which is about as long as anyone stays famous in newspapers.”
When Postle sits down with Guardian Australia, neat piles of his life’s work are stacked six inches high on every available surface of his dining table in such a way that one gets an immediate impression of his diverse body of work and an award-winning talent.
His archive numbers in excess of 60,000 images spanning seven decades of Australian sport, politics, culture and news, starting from the time in 1957 that his press photographer father’s Graflex 5x4 camera got him within arm’s length of Bill Haley and the Comets.
Postle first learnt his craft at the knee of his father but was also taken under the wing of another press photographer, Bill Millar senior. “They taught me to wait and not just blaze away as happens nowadays,” he says. “It was probably the best training I ever had.”
The piles of photos aren’t on the table for the benefit of this interview; in the last few years Postle has produced no less than five books compiling the best of his life’s work and is the process of putting a few more together.
He shows a wonderful picture of a fresh-faced Pat Cash (main image), captured mid-dive, attempting to play a backhand to Ivan Lendl on the grass at Kooyong during the 1983 Australian Open.
Then there is the thrilling shot of the streamer-covered Rolling Stones playing live in Brisbane on their 1965 tour, which looks like it was taken on stage. Indeed Postle did just wander in from the wings to take it, he reveals.
“It was a totally different time to work and I’m glad I did my work as a press photographer in that age,” he says. “There was very little confrontation with security guards or anyone else. They knew that you were there to do a job and they let you go ahead and do it.”
Though he covered every major sporting event worth photographing across the best part of half a century at the Courier-Mail and the Age, some of Postle’s richest and striking work was drawn from lesser-attended and sparsely covered moments, like Bill Lawry – one hand on the Junction Oval gate as he left the field for the final time – bowing out of Melbourne club cricket in 1975.
Understandably, Postle regrets the demise of print media in recent years, lamenting the presence of full page advertisements on the front of the paper he’d risen early to work on for nearly 30 years. “I had one thing in mind and that was page one and page three,” he says. “Or maybe the best sport picture.”
That makes him think immediately of Graham Perkin, the visionary Age editor whose premature death rocked his Melbourne staff. “He was such a great person,” Postle says. “What have you got for me today?” Perkin would enthusiastically ask after sidling up to photographers and leaning over their work.
Three hours in his company slip by far too quickly as Postle tells of the fascinating and sometimes unexpected stories behind some of the iconic images of Australian sport, photographs sports lovers have stared at for decades. That classic shot of Garry Sobers and a shirtless Bill Lawry delighting in each others company? Not quite as it seems, Postle says.
The West Indian skipper didn’t want to pose for it at all, slamming the dressing room door inches from the nose of Sun pressman Clive MacKinnon. Sobers’ smile was mostly for Postle’s camera.
MacKinnon was also on the spot to play a supporting role in one of Postle’s best and most loved shots, when he so poignantly captured the relationship between 1977 Melbourne Cup favourite Reckless and veteran trainer Tommy Woodcock. Postle had regularly called in on Woodcock for three full weeks pleading his case for the shot. “People might think I’m funny if they see me sleeping with a horse,” the 74-year-old protested.
A shot like that was a personal quest for Postle. He wanted to capture the bond between horse and trainer; 45 years earlier Phar Lap had died in Woodcock’s arms. Weeks before the Reckless shot, Postle saw the horse nuzzle between the trainer’s legs and lift him clean off the ground. That day, wanting to establish a rapport with his subject, he’d left his camera in the car. “It was a marvellous relationship, sort of like a pet,” Postle says.
‘I told the picture editor I had the picture three weeks before’
Still, Woodcock needed convincing. Postle blew up the inflatable mattress himself, placed it next to the resting horse and called the trainer over. Noting the amount of trouble that he’d gone to, Woodcock finally ceded on what was Cup eve. “So he laid down on it but I said ‘Tommy, this does not make a picture until that horse gets down near you’. He looked at Reckless, Reckless looked at him and this big stallion dropped down and put his head on his chest.”
“He reached up and tickled it under its neck and the horse closed its eyes. I had a big white umbrella in this hand and a flash gun in this hand pointing it to give me softer light and the first part of it, when he put his head on his chest, I nearly pressed the shutter. I thought ‘no’. The flash and the umbrella were taken out of my hand and it was Clive MacKinnon from the Sun. He was the opposition but he looked after the flash and the umbrella so I could put two hands on the camera and get a sharper picture. He was my opposition. What a fantastic thing that was for him to do.”
Editors at The Age kept the front page slot of the Cup-day edition open for three weeks on Postle’s promise; he delivered with an hour to spare. “Perhaps there is no better known example of the Postle artistry,” wrote his former colleague Peter McFarline. “Woodock’s devotion to his horse was well documented but it was never more vividly shown than in this photograph.”
That sense of emotional depth is everywhere in Postle’s sports photography. Every AFL fan remembers the late Darren Millane spinning the ball above his head after Collingwood’s hoodoo-banishing premiership win in 1990, but it was Postle who captured the emotion-charged finale to the 1991 VFA decider, when Millane’s brother Sean serendipitously repeated the feat as the final siren sounded on his own side’s triumph.
There is also great depth and intimacy in the work Postle did once he’d talked his way into dressing rooms, hotels and hospital wards, capturing private moments of reflection in an era before the stars of sport were so thoroughly roped off and insulated from the outside world.
Postle’s magical shot of coach Ron Barassi curled up asleep with the 1975 premiership cup balanced on a ledge above his head is, he tells me, exactly as it seems. He took it when the football legend ducked away from the post-game party at North Melbourne president Allen Aylett’s house.
Postle says both Ian and Greg Chappell gave him an “open ticket” to wander into the Australian dressing room for the similarly candid shots he snapped of cricketers. So we glimpsed Doug Walters playing cards with Graham McKenzie hovering over his shoulder during the rained out Melbourne Test of 1970-71.
It was Postle who most tellingly captured Rick McCosker striding off the MCG with his broken jaw held together by bandages during the Centenary Test of 1977, though he modestly offers that the lesser publicised shots by colleagues Terry Phelan and John Hart were superior.
While the fundamentals of the job remain the same since Postle quit the Age in 1996, much has also changed in this era of megapixels and unlimited hard drive storage. In the early days Postle would venture out to a day of cricket of football armed with only two magazines of film, both loaded with 12 shots. The finite supply of materials begged restraint, a keen eye for the patterns of play and also a decent amount of good fortune. “Bruce Postle apparently got lucky more times than enough,” McFarline once said.
Sometimes inspiration struck in unlikely surrounds. In 1979, while driving on a bridge across Barwon River en route to another shooting another story south of Geelong, Postle spotted waterskier Richard Crisp taking off from the banks and visualised the wall of water from Crisp’s point of view. Making a u-turn and convincing the speedboat driver to let him lie along the boat’s bow, Postle had in a quick detour captured an image that would win him the sporting section of the Australian press photographer of the year awards.
“The whole thing was sort of an inspirational job I suppose, because every day was different and you met people from all walks of life,” Postle concludes. Hours on he has only tackled the stories behind a dozen or so of his photographs. “I wouldn’t have swapped the job for all the rice in China. The pay wasn’t the greatest, but the pleasure of the job was.”
If press photography is best described as a craft, Bruce Postle undoubtedly elevated it and pushed its limits, and for that Australian sports lovers were well served. Les Carlyon, again: “He is also – and he would blanch at the term – an artist.”
