Profile: Bob Connolly, a life of observation

After a long absence, director Bob Connolly returns with Mrs. Carey’s Concert. Miguel Gonzalez spoke with him about his life in documentary.

Connolly was not the type of child that dreamt of working on TV or film. When he dropped out of an Arts Law degree in 1964, he joined the ABC as a cadet journalist. He did “reasonably well” and ended up doing a stint in New York. When he returned in 1968, he joined a current affairs program, first as an assistant producer, and ultimately working as an on camera reporter.
“But I was hopeless at the studio, like a stunned mullet, terrified of live stuff. My brain used to go blank!” he admitted.

So Connolly was sent to work on the show’s “Sunday stories”, doing five-minute reports until, three years later, he was asked to do a half-hour story for the documentary series A Big Country. It was his first  observational work, about a scheme in the Sydney affluent beachside suburb of Avalon, where Indigenous children were invited to live by the sea for a few days. Connolly spent time with one of those boys, then with the family, and finally he watched them come together to document their reaction. “It was the first time I actually got to do a little meaty film,” he said. “It was observational filmmaking. I was just scratching the  surface of it then, but what I realised is that if you’re patient and document these microcosmic events, they can really say something about important things such as, in this case, black-white and crosscultural relations.”
A few years went by and, burnt-out, Connolly took a year off and went to the US. When he returned and joined the documentary section at the ABC, the one that had given him that first observational opportunity, he didn’t know he would find more than a job.
Enter Robin Anderson, a young researcher just back from Columbia University, where she had done a postgraduate course in sociology. She brought back with her a theoretical understanding of the process of  watching and documenting people which, among other things, Connolly – with his journalistic background – found fascinating.
“I was absolutely blessed and it was one of those things that if you’re lucky, it happens to you. We just happened to mesh beautifully. I was living in Mosman at the time, and within 10 days, she moved in,” recalled Connolly.
After more than 10 years at the ABC, he felt his work there was done. Anderson persuaded him to quit, and so he did. They started working together as independent filmmakers in 1978. Their first film was  commissioned by the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania; a 35mm cinema short created to show the audience what would be lost if the Franklin River was flooded to build a dam. With a team of six others, Connolly and Anderson went down the river in a raft, but things got dangerous. It was one of the few occasions in which work became irrelevant and his concern about his partner took precedence. Most of the time, they “got on like a house on fire”.
“Our work and life together was just wonderful. She was once asked, you’ve been working together for more than 20 years, what’s your secret?’ She said ‘Well, I think he’s better than me at what we do, and he thinks I’m better than him’.  That perfectly summed up the mutual respect we had for each other,” said Connolly.
Their first feature documentary First Contact – a recount of the 1930s first encounter of the natives of the interior highlands of New Guinea with the Australian gold-seeking Leahy Brothers, and its effects in the region over the years – was nominated for the Oscar in 1982.
“A lot of people want to be documentary filmmakers because it’s so much fun, but it’s always been hard to make a living out of it,” said Connolly. “We were very fortunate; First Contact did very well around the world. It was funded by Dick Smith, and when he made his money back he handed back the rights to us. I still have an income from that film; that underpinned our later observational work, which has never made heaps of money… but enough to have a career.”
All their other projects were critically acclaimed, both in Australia and overseas; they ranged from two follow ups to First Contact (Joe Leahy’s Neighbours in 1989 and Black Harvest in 1992) to projects about a council election (Rats in the Ranks, 1996) and the struggles of the music department at the University of Sydney (Facing the Music, 2001). Tragically, Anderson was diagnosed with terminal cancer two days before the premiere screening of Facing the Music at the Sydney Film Festival.
“We stood on the stage, facing a standing ovation but dying inside. It was a terrible experience,” said Connolly.

According to Connolly, Robin Anderson taught him two things. The first one was integrity.