Pittwater Life February 2018 Issue

Sea
Changers
Life Stories
Behind a lillypilly hedge on Barrenjoey
Road near Sandy Point is an original
old timber beach house. Old Man
Banksia grows beside worn steps leading
up to the verandah where a Sea Shepherd
beach towel is draped over the railing.
I’m here to meet photographer Robbi
Newman who with his wife Carol is one
of the co-founders of Living Ocean. The
tall, willowy Carol greets me and leads me
through the main house with its original
ornate ceilings, surfboards adorning the
walls, and a glass cabinet full of old cameras
and seashells.
Robbi’s studio is in the garden, and
stretched diagonally across the corrugated
iron roof is a large model of a humpback
whale. “We were given it,” Robbi says casually,
when I ask how the cetacean found its
way there. “The kindergarten kids love it.”
Robbi Newman grew up between Dural,
where his family had orchards, and at Palm
Beach. His grandfather was a renowned
photographer, who travelled all around
Australia shooting with plate cameras.
“So, the house always had cameras in it
– old Kodaks and Brownies – and even as a
kid I used to take lot of photos.”
His father died when Robbi was less
than 12 months old; and he describes his
stepfather as “a ratbag who ran down the
family fruit farm”. Robbi was at The King’s
School in Parramatta when, aged 15, he
left home and moved in with friends at
Newport. He used to get a lift to school with
an art teacher who lived at Avalon, until the
teacher moved to Tasmania. So from then
on Robbi went to Narrabeen High.
“I spent one whole autumn surfing one
year at the Wedge, and when I went back to
school, the headmaster just said: ‘Newman,
you’re back.’ That’s all there was to it, which
I thought was fantastic.”
Robbi went to the University of New England
and studied Natural Resources.
“I was a child of the ’60s and ’70s. It was
the ‘dawning of Aquarius’ and we were
going to save the planet. But I was torn between
being an environmentalist and being
a creative person.”
Robbi “got sucked in” to the peninsula’s
creative world, taking photographs and
writing environmental stories for the surfing
magazine, Tracks, while making friends
with surf filmmakers, Paul Witzig, Alby Falzon
and others like David Elfick, who was
the producer of ‘Newsfront’ and one of the
executive producers of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’.
He travelled around Australia working on
the 1974 surfing film, ‘Rolling Home’, and
had already started taking photographs for
a range of magazines like Overlander and
also expedition photography with Australian
Himalayan Expeditions to the Himalayas
and beyond.
He went on to travel the world as a photographer,
working and living in Singapore
and early Dubai, shooting for airlines and
Living Ocean has achieved so much
for the marine environment over eight
years, thanks to Robbi Newman and co.
Story by Rosamund Burton
ad agencies. This opened the doors to
destinations like New York, London, Africa
and Asia.
Returning to base himself as an advertising
photographer in the booming days of
advertising at North Sydney he became one
of the top 10 photographers of the time.
Robbi and Carol met in 1980. She was a
model and he was taking photos of her on
a swing at Palm Beach for Cleo magazine.
“We couldn’t do the shoot, because it was
raining,” said Carol.
“So I went to his place at Bungan for
breakfast. That happened a couple of mornings,
so we got to know each other.”
They worked together off and on. Then
a job took Robbi to Singapore. He came
back to Australia, and when he returned to
Singapore, Carol went with him.
“The advertising agency put us up in the
Ava Gardner suite at Raffles Hotel, and the
billiard room was set up as the photographic
studio,” she recounts. Robbi and
Carol continued to travel the world with
his photography work, and they had two
children, Jamie and Claudia, who are both
now in their 20s.
Before they bought this house 10 years
ago they lived at Whale Beach. Robbi sold
that property and bought this, not thinking
they would live here, as he had work lined
up in Dubai. But that fell through and the
cottage became the family home, which
they have grown to love, and Jamie lives in
38 FEBRUARY 2018
The Local Voice Since 1991