Offering a look back at nearly half a century of candid snaps and portraits of Melbourne’s burgeoning punk scene in the 1970s, photographer Peter Milne is sharing his best-loved and best-known images for South Side Festival.
Taking place from 10-16 May 2025 at Frankston Arts Centre for South Side Festival, Peter Milne’s Lovers and misfits exhibition gives audiences a look into the burgeoning music scene of mid-70s Melbourne and a glimpse at a bygone time in the city’s cultural history.
“I must have been 15,” Peter recalls of the images compiled in this new retrospective, “up till I was about 19, all of that work. It’s very early, it’s more than 45 years ago! I look at it now and there’s a lot I remember, but a lot I don’t remember at all. It’s a very strange kind of relationship I have with it, because it’s almost as if it was done by a person who doesn’t exist any more. A person I used to know very well.”
Peter Milne – Lovers and misfits
- Peter Milne’s photography exhibition featuring punk icons like Nick Cave, Anita Lane, Rowland S Howard, and Polly Borland
- 10 May – 25 June, Frankston Arts Centre Curved Wall Gallery
- Free entry as part of South Side Festival, more info here
Keep up with the latest music news, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
The lengthy process of condensing almost five decades of images into a single gallery space represented a sizeable challenge for the prolific photographer. With such a deep personal attachment to the work, charting his early development within an artform that would proceed to define his career, Peter admits he couldn’t be nearly objective enough to make the call on what would eventually hang on the wall.
“It was too complex,” he confesses. “A strange, beautiful, sad, nostalgic sort of feeling I have about the work I did when I was a child…”
It was with the assistance of photographic curator and publisher Helen Frajman that he could tackle the task of boiling his life’s work down into just a single stack of images. Her assistance proved invaluable, with Peter calling his artistic partner “a super editor of photographic work, and a great sequencer. The real core of great editing is the sequencing.”
“Just photographing my friends…”
Following their initial discussions in the mid-2010s, Peter’s catalogue was boiled down to 130 images and formed the basis of an earlier exhibition, Juvenilia. A collection of images spanning the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the collection depicted Milne’s home life and growing interest in the Melbourne music scene. The work mixes vivid colour images with lively monochrome snaps, presenting a plethora of social and musical activity, as well as a bold demonstration of Milne’s ability to capture life in its most energetic and authentic form.
“The Lovers and misfits version is a sort of truncated form of the full Juvenilia project,” he says today. “It was really just me trying to learn how to take photographs, but also just photographing my friends! Whilst I had no intention of the work becoming a historical record, you know, history by definition is you’re just living and then when you look back on it, what you lived becomes history.”
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Peter’s appealingly matter-of-fact approach to his chosen artform began at the age of 12, following a trip with his mother to the NGV to see legendary performance artists Gilbert and George. It was an experience that had a profound effect on the young Peter, though he couldn’t quite understand why.
“I was completely enthralled and hypnotised by it,” he recalls. “Then, a couple of years later, I watched Le Chien Andalou – Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist film – and that was it. From that moment, that completely cemented my determination that I wanted to be an artist.”
In short order, Peter tried to learn how to draw, paint, and sculpt, but admits the endeavour was hopeless, much to his disappointment at the time. Yet it was a childhood friend who took the budding artist into a dark room, and showed him how to develop film and produce photographs.
The experience was nothing short of absolutely transformative. “The very first time I did it, I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was what I was going to spend the rest of my life doing,” he says. “I was 15 at the time, and that was it.”
The fifty years since that lightning-rod moment have produced some of the most dynamic and arresting images of Melbourne’s musical and cultural scene in the city’s long, vibrant history. A retrospective such as Lovers and misfits is sure to honour that legacy, and take viewers right back to a bygone era.
Peter Milne’s Lovers and misfits exhibition will be taking place at the Frankston Arts Centre Curved Wall Gallery across 10-16 May 2025. Find out more information here.
This article was made in partnership with South Side Festival.
