In 1974, Melbourne publisher Outback Press produced a small book that almost felt like a magazine, perhaps even a fanzine: Into the Hollow Mountains. The book’s cover boldly offered a subtitle: “Photographs by Robert Ashton”.
Even with this overt labelling, the actual work – a celebration of a vigorous working-class suburb evolving before the rest of Melbourne’s eyes into a countercultural marvel of cheap “fixer-uppers”, bohemian share houses and wonders like the Free Store – didn’t feel like a photographic collection first and foremost.
Multi-authored, with many of its pages unadorned by text, Ashton’s two-to-a-page photographs were interstices to a message summed up in the punchline of the last page. It held the anti-gentrification poem Get out of Fitzroy, by the poet soon to become known as Π.O. (Pi.O) which reads in part: “TRENDIES / You’ve called in CULTURE / closed down our greek cinemas / pulled down street shelters”.
