Pittwater Life June 2022 Issue

long lunch when we heard Whitlam had
been sacked and was about to make a
speech on the steps,” he recalls. “I didn’t
have a camera, so I was standing in the
background between Bob Hawke and Bill
Hayden when Norman Gunston (the hapless
chat show host prone to daily shaving
disasters played by comedian Gary Macdonald)
turned up. Hawkie told him this
was far too important to make fun of.”
And the project Pieter is most proud of?
“Working as director of photography
with Scott Hicks (who later directed the
Oscar-winning Shine) on the four-part
documentary series The Great Wall of Iron
with unprecedented access to the Chinese
People’s Liberation Army.”
It was a 14-week shoot for the BBC,
NZBC and The Discovery Channel. “Some
of the soldiers took us back to their
remote villages to eat rice with their
parents,” he said. “You’d never be allowed
to do that now.”
No sooner did Hicks’ team leave Beijing
than another story involving the Chinese
People’s Liberation Army began dominating
the world’s TV screens. The Tiananmen
Square massacre began on June 4,
1989 when the same army’s tanks started
rolling into the Chinese capital’s Beijing’s
historic Imperial centre.
Sadly, Pieter – something of a latterday
vampire who prefers to shoot in the
pre-dawn sunrise or the pre-dusk sunset
– hasn’t brought his most-celebrated
treasure to the cafe. This is a fragment
(generally kept in cotton wool within an
old-fashioned Kodak film canister) of
the prow of the Titanic (where Leonardo
DiCaprio as Jack declares himself “the
King of the World” in James Cameron’s
multi-Oscar-winning 1997 movie).
Pieter didn’t work on Titanic. But he did
work with “Jim” on the Cameron-directed
3D IMAX documentary Titanic 3D: Ghosts
of the Abyss, exploring the watery grave
of “the unsinkable ship” and the 1,517 human
souls who perished when it hit that
iceberg in 1912.
In 2001, Cameron, who surely has
earned the right to be a cinematic perfectionist,
had a massive budget for a
documentary series of US$13 million. It
grossed more than twice that at the box
office. It allowed Cameron – an underwater
explorer in his own right (in 2012 he
descended in Deepsea Challenger in the
world’s deepest solo depth ever experience
by a human: 10,908 metres below
sea level) – to hire the Russian research
vessel Academik Mstislav Keleysh, complete
with a mixed bag of 80 specialists.
Scientists, sailors and film crew were
all dependent on two Russian-built
submersibles (Mir- 1 and Mir- 2) capable
Continued on page 36
Visionary
Life Stories
thinking
Pieter de Vries has moved in high circles and
descended deep oceans during his career as
a photographer and cinematographer; now
he’s focused on a local cause.
Life Stories
Story by Steve Meacham
Award-winning photographer and
cinematographer Pieter de Vries
does a wicked impression of the
next king of Great Britain (and presumably
Australia).
The Bilgola Plateau resident says he was
just 21 when he and Prince Charles first
met at Yarralumla, the Governor-General’s
residence in Canberra.
Pieter (his Dutch father arrived in Australia
after World War II before meeting
Pieter’s mother and settling in Lismore)
had joined the ABC as an assistant cameraman
and been assigned to cover the
Queen’s royal tour of Australia in 1974.
So he was obliged to go to the ‘meetand-greet’
– at Government House. Except
he couldn’t afford to buy a suit. Thinking
he could blend into the background, the
young Pieter borrowed an ill-fitting jacket
from a senior cameraman and a mismatched
pair of trousers from another.
The story is much better when Pieter – a
born raconteur and lauded elder of the
Australian Cinematographers Society –
tells it at 7.30am on a Sunday over coffee
at his local cafe. Then it comes complete
with vocal and physical impersonations
of the young Prince of Wales (fiddling
with his cufflinks), the uptight British
equerry (with the plummy voice straight
out of Eton) and the young Pieter cast in
a jacket with sleeves so long his hands
could barely grab a passing cocktail.
All was going to plan, Pieter recalls,
until the assorted press pack were addressed
by the Prince of Wales’ hoigtytoigty
master of protocol. “Form yourselves
into groups of no more than five”,
he instructed them. Preferably in a semicircle.
Never ask HRH a question. Just
answer his question, then let him move
on to the next group. Most importantly,
if he asks you a question, preface it with
“Your Royal Highness”.
Suddenly a tinkle of a bell introduced
HRH arriving down the stairs… and making
a beeline for the worst dressed guy in
the room.
Pieter’s words to royalty after being
asked the first question of the night and
told to address the heir to an ancient
throne?
“‘Yes, Your Royal Worship!’”
And the heir’s reaction?
“He laughed and moved on…”
Pieter’s long and extraordinary career
sounds so much like an Australian version
of Forrest Gump you half expect Tom
Hanks to arrive with a box of chocolates.
He was there in August 1975 when
the then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam
poured sacrificial dirt into the hands of
Vincent Lingiari, handing over the freehold
title of the Gurindji lands.
He was also there on the steps of Old
Parliament House to watch Whitlam’s
famous dismissal speech. “I was on a
day off and eating a Steak Diane at a
34 JUNE 2022
The Local Voice Since 1991
The Local Voice Since 1991
CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE: A self portrait at Bilgola Beach; Parliament
House, 1972; in Antarctica; there at ‘the dismissal’; shooting ‘The Great Wall
of Iron’ in China; on the Titanic 3D ‘Ghosts’ shoot; at Cape Canaveral; the
‘Rats of New York’; on tour with Gough Whitlam; Pittwater and Careel Bay;
pouring sand into the hand of Vincent Lingiari at Wave Hill Station in the NT;
with director James Cameron; with Whitlam before the historic NT visit.
JUNE 2022 35