Geoff Ellis, writer, photographer, councillor, activist and petrol head. Photo: Shaun Inguanzo
By Liane Arno
“START with the gory details!” I am getting advice from Geoff Ellis on the technique he used when gaining the attention of meeting-weary colleagues in OH&S meetings. It’s a technique he still uses.
So – where do I start? What gore and guts can I reveal of our local councillor’s history? I quite like how he got here. Geoff reveals that his place in Australia was realised through the “assignment” of two Irish Catholic convicts.
One – his great-great-grandmother – a feisty, five-foot, cranky woman who was sent to Australia for stealing a cloak. Head shaved as a public humiliation as she never did what she was told, she was forced to work crushing rocks and boulders that would become the roads of the new settlement of Sydney. I can just imagine this gritty woman swinging a mattock and cursing, as the Irish are wont to do, imagining that every rock she bashed was the head of a person in authority. She met the man to whom she would bear 10 children (only four survived into adulthood) who had been transported himself at age 14 for pickpocketing. What a combination of genes for Geoff to inherit several generations later!
“START with the gory details!” I am getting advice from Geoff Ellis on the technique he used when gaining the attention of meeting-weary colleagues in OH&S meetings. It’s a technique he still uses.
So – where do I start? What gore and guts can I reveal of our local councillor’s history? I quite like how he got here. Geoff reveals that his place in Australia was realised through the “assignment” of two Irish Catholic convicts.
One – his great-great-grandmother – a feisty, five-foot, cranky woman who was sent to Australia for stealing a cloak. Head shaved as a public humiliation as she never did what she was told, she was forced to work crushing rocks and boulders that would become the roads of the new settlement of Sydney. I can just imagine this gritty woman swinging a mattock and cursing, as the Irish are wont to do, imagining that every rock she bashed was the head of a person in authority. She met the man to whom she would bear 10 children (only four survived into adulthood) who had been transported himself at age 14 for pickpocketing. What a combination of genes for Geoff to inherit several generations later!
The family remained in Sydney and it was here that Geoff was born in an industrial area surrounded by the sounds of locomotive trains. He was passionate about running and cycling. “For escape – or discovery?” I ask. He laughs and tells me that it was to escape in the first instance, but it led to a life of discovery. He would ride with like-minded souls to the Blue Mountains and to Warragamba Dam seeking a quieter place.
So, too, in school, where he escaped to the library. He tells me, “It was also a good place to get out of playing football.” Knowing a little of Geoff, I have a list of books that I thought might have been his favourites in his formative years and so am shocked to learn that his reading material of choice was – oh dear! – car magazines. His father, spray painter with Telecom by day, moonlighting backyard mechanic out of hours, taught Geoff a whole bunch of really useful facts. To this day he can tell you the compression ratios of V8s from the `70s. Very useful in the council chamber, I’m sure.
After a while – after all, the HQ Holden had remained unchanged for five years – Geoff began to immerse himself in the world of science fiction. One of his favourites was Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, where firemen start fires rather than putting them out. At the recent awards for the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction, Geoff wore one of his trademark black t-shirts with the firemen’s slogan: Burn and Destroy. The people in this society avoid books because they only introduce unnecessary complexity and contradiction into their lives. They are not allowed to think independently or have meaningful conversations. Instead, they drive very fast, watch a lot of television and listen to the radio through “seashells” attached to their ears.
The Rank Release film of the book headlined it as “a weird and strange future.” Geoff’s view is that it accurately predicted the future of today – a broken society with the spread of factoids, not knowledge, of political correctness and censorship where social media rather than libraries inform us. Needless to say, he, like Bradbury, is a passionate supporter of libraries.
Geoff started to form these views in his teens – but, “being an absolute bloody idiot,” as he describes himself, in an era of Gough Whitlam’s free university education, decided to become a forklift driver – and yes – a storeman and packer. It was a time of significant union influence and power. Often Geoff and his fellow workers would be pulled off the job to support another company’s workers in a dispute of which they had no understanding (nor were provided with any). Once, in the factory where Geoff was working, a manager instinctively replaced a fallen box onto a forklift. It resulted in a three-day stoppage for workers who could ill afford not to have a full pay packet.
While he supported unions, Geoff was not so keen on the ability they had to force people to take action without being fully informed. Incredibly, in those days of compulsory unionism, when workers were provided with a union dues deduction form at the time of their interview, Geoff resigned from the storeman and packers union – and kept his job.
He was later to become a union rep but was able to work constructively with management and the shop floor to find common ground.
Better still, it was at a union conference that he met his wife Leslie. They moved to Melbourne in 2009 before finding their way down to the Bass Coast a couple of years later.
It was here that Geoff became seriously involved in the community. He also started writing and is now editor/publisher of the Waterline News, founded by Grantville’s Roger Clark. Geoff strives to maintain Roger's editorial and social legacy. The magazine is freely available to people who want to know what is going on across this shire of ours. Geoff loves writing. He reckons that everyone has a story. He also writes poems; you can find some of them on the Bass Coast poetry wall at the Wonthaggi library.
Geoff believes that as a community if we stick together we can get things done. To that end he is involved in a great many causes: advocating for social inclusion of people with a disability; reconciliation (he proudly reminds me that McMillan is no longer the name of our electorate) and LGBTQI equality. His motion in support of marriage equality was adopted by Bass Coast Council before the infamous 2018 postal plebiscite. This year he joined a council and Bass Coast Health contingent at the 2020 St Kilda Pride March.
His latest mission is to preserve the Lang Lang proving ground’s biodiversity for future generations once Holden departs. Given his love of cars, perhaps he’s come full circle.
One more passion: photographing the environment around him. He is entering ArtSpace’s After the Fires photographic exhibition with photos of the regeneration of Grantville’s Nature Reserve. If these photographs get as much attention as everything else Geoff does, I’m sure they will be magnificent.
After the Fires opens at ArtSpace, 1 Bent Street, Wonthaggi, at 2pm on April 5. All welcome. All proceeds to the Gippsland Emergency Relief Fund. Contact ArtSpace to enter your photograph.
So, too, in school, where he escaped to the library. He tells me, “It was also a good place to get out of playing football.” Knowing a little of Geoff, I have a list of books that I thought might have been his favourites in his formative years and so am shocked to learn that his reading material of choice was – oh dear! – car magazines. His father, spray painter with Telecom by day, moonlighting backyard mechanic out of hours, taught Geoff a whole bunch of really useful facts. To this day he can tell you the compression ratios of V8s from the `70s. Very useful in the council chamber, I’m sure.
After a while – after all, the HQ Holden had remained unchanged for five years – Geoff began to immerse himself in the world of science fiction. One of his favourites was Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, where firemen start fires rather than putting them out. At the recent awards for the Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction, Geoff wore one of his trademark black t-shirts with the firemen’s slogan: Burn and Destroy. The people in this society avoid books because they only introduce unnecessary complexity and contradiction into their lives. They are not allowed to think independently or have meaningful conversations. Instead, they drive very fast, watch a lot of television and listen to the radio through “seashells” attached to their ears.
The Rank Release film of the book headlined it as “a weird and strange future.” Geoff’s view is that it accurately predicted the future of today – a broken society with the spread of factoids, not knowledge, of political correctness and censorship where social media rather than libraries inform us. Needless to say, he, like Bradbury, is a passionate supporter of libraries.
Geoff started to form these views in his teens – but, “being an absolute bloody idiot,” as he describes himself, in an era of Gough Whitlam’s free university education, decided to become a forklift driver – and yes – a storeman and packer. It was a time of significant union influence and power. Often Geoff and his fellow workers would be pulled off the job to support another company’s workers in a dispute of which they had no understanding (nor were provided with any). Once, in the factory where Geoff was working, a manager instinctively replaced a fallen box onto a forklift. It resulted in a three-day stoppage for workers who could ill afford not to have a full pay packet.
While he supported unions, Geoff was not so keen on the ability they had to force people to take action without being fully informed. Incredibly, in those days of compulsory unionism, when workers were provided with a union dues deduction form at the time of their interview, Geoff resigned from the storeman and packers union – and kept his job.
He was later to become a union rep but was able to work constructively with management and the shop floor to find common ground.
Better still, it was at a union conference that he met his wife Leslie. They moved to Melbourne in 2009 before finding their way down to the Bass Coast a couple of years later.
It was here that Geoff became seriously involved in the community. He also started writing and is now editor/publisher of the Waterline News, founded by Grantville’s Roger Clark. Geoff strives to maintain Roger's editorial and social legacy. The magazine is freely available to people who want to know what is going on across this shire of ours. Geoff loves writing. He reckons that everyone has a story. He also writes poems; you can find some of them on the Bass Coast poetry wall at the Wonthaggi library.
Geoff believes that as a community if we stick together we can get things done. To that end he is involved in a great many causes: advocating for social inclusion of people with a disability; reconciliation (he proudly reminds me that McMillan is no longer the name of our electorate) and LGBTQI equality. His motion in support of marriage equality was adopted by Bass Coast Council before the infamous 2018 postal plebiscite. This year he joined a council and Bass Coast Health contingent at the 2020 St Kilda Pride March.
His latest mission is to preserve the Lang Lang proving ground’s biodiversity for future generations once Holden departs. Given his love of cars, perhaps he’s come full circle.
One more passion: photographing the environment around him. He is entering ArtSpace’s After the Fires photographic exhibition with photos of the regeneration of Grantville’s Nature Reserve. If these photographs get as much attention as everything else Geoff does, I’m sure they will be magnificent.
After the Fires opens at ArtSpace, 1 Bent Street, Wonthaggi, at 2pm on April 5. All welcome. All proceeds to the Gippsland Emergency Relief Fund. Contact ArtSpace to enter your photograph.