#RennieAndMe: Tim McKew on life in front of Rennie Ellis’s lens
Activist. Trailblazer. Muse. No matter what you call him, one thing is certain: Tim McKew’s life story is woven into the fabric of Melbourne’s history.
A child star turned satirist, performance artist, cabaret singing star and chameleon, McKew’s career saw him perform everywhere from London’s Piccadilly Circus to Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Amsterdam and Shanghai (where he played the city’s only underground gay club as the Dowager Empress of China).
Written about in Vogue Australia and a fixture of the social pages, he was a favourite subject for photographers across Melbourne during the 1970s and 80s – and perhaps none more so than Rennie Ellis, who captured McKew’s likeness on many occasions over the course of his glittering career.
McKew was delighted to spot some of these portraits of himself in Melbourne Out Loud, the retrospective of Ellis’s work currently on display at State Library Victoria.
'I feel very honoured to be included in the exhibition,’ he says. ‘Seeing those images was very moving to me – thinking about that time and getting a very special sense of history, a sense of continuity from the past to the present.’
McKew first met Ellis in 1978, at the Paraphernalia Gallery on Collins Street – a hotspot for artists, bohemians and the queer community. McKew was performing a lunchtime queer cabaret act called Ladies Who Lunch, staged in the gallery window, and Ellis snapped his photo.
‘After that, Rennie would turn up at most of my shows,’ recalls McKew. ‘I just thought, who is this guy? He’s everywhere!’
McKew remembers Ellis as ‘a little bit cheeky, but very kind, very playful and very generous’. According to McKew, he was the kind of person who relished photography’s inherent voyeurism and liked nothing better than recording candid moments, whether that was backstage at a fashion show, in the crowd at an AIDS charity fundraiser, or on the field at the Melbourne Cup.
‘Rennie captured all those moments,’ says McKew. ‘He was ubiquitous.’
For McKew, Ellis’s genius was in the way he trained his lens on his subjects. ‘He was always very respectful,’ he says. ‘He would photograph everyone from prime ministers to prostitutes and everybody in between. He was curious about capturing characters from various levels of society.’
This included shooting the trailblazers and changemakers of Melbourne’s vibrant queer culture, across parties, protests, pride marches and awareness-raising events.
‘Rennie captured the light and shade of those times,’ observes McKew. ‘His work gives a sense of the timeline, of where history comes from in terms of queer culture.’
McKew says that one of the most important things about Ellis’s archive is that it recorded an era of great change and hard-won battles for LQBTQIA+ rights.
‘This was a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence,’ says McKew (sex between men was a crime in Victoria until 1980). ‘You could be fired from a teaching profession if they found that you were gay. You could be imprisoned. You were like a second-class citizen.’
Importantly, Ellis’s work contributed to changing social attitudes towards homosexuality. ‘Political people and lobbyists can get the laws changed, but it's the artists who change the attitudes of society,’ says McKew. For him, it’s the work of artists like himself, and like Ellis, who illuminate and subsequently destigmatise queer life.
‘You need artists – the writers, the performers – so that people can see that we're not aliens, that this is all very reasonable, and it's about equality and acceptance. In fact, it’s artists that do the most important work in changing culture and changing attitudes.’
He believes that Ellis’s work is an important archive of Melbourne’s queer history – a history that’s essential for current generations to know. ‘Things didn't happen by magic; people had to be out there fighting for change, fighting for equality, to get the laws changed. Artists had to address and confront the issues of the time.’
‘These histories are so important to capture. If you don't know where you've come from, you won't know where you're going. You have to know what the history is, otherwise, you can repeat the same mistakes.’
Tim McKew's autobiography, Thou Shalt Not, So I DID! will be launched at the 2026 Midsumma Festival, followed by a retrospective cabaret show called McKusical.
Image credit: Matto Lucas
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