Alfred and Sue Gregory look at photographs from Everest to Africa.By Judy Wolff
IMAGES of the world’s most captivating mountaineering achievement have a local link.
Alfred Gregory’s photographic record of the historic 1953 expedition that took Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to the summit of Mt Everest form a major exhibition in the Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill until 24 February.
The veteran British photographer and mountaineer now resides in the Dandenong Ranges.
From his home Mr Gregory recalled with sparkling clarity personal anecdotes of the expedition, many now included in a folio book accompanying the exhibition, Alfred Gregory: Photographs from Everest to Africa.
His inclusion on the famous expedition was hardly formal.
He told how, on a club climb in Wales in 1952, John (later Baron) Hunt, leader of the expedition, enquired of the group of friends: “Does anybody know anything about photography? Yes, you do, Greg. Right, you’re in charge of photography.”
With these words began a life of achievement and opportunity that continues today for this 94-year-old adventurer.
Luck, timing and exceptional management were hallmarks of the expedition, Mr Gregory explained.
A failed French expedition a few months earlier had left the conquest open.
The date of the British team’s successful ascent and speed of its relay to London became one of the century’s greatest scoops.
Hillary and Tenzing reached the summit on 29 May.
Just three days later the news had reached its mark.
Times correspondent and mountaineer James Morris, in a death-defying descent, carried a coded message to a long-distance runner, who rushed it to a secret radio outpost in the Himalayas, reaching The Times just three days later on the eve of the June 3 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
News of the triumph was a double crown to Britain still recovering from World War II.
Mr Gregory told how the team, still on the mountain, leapt with joy on hearing the words of a short wave radio broadcast: “All this and Everest too”.
While news reached London by radio, the world had to wait another month for photographs.
Mr Gregory has always concentrated on the human aspect in his photography.
Of his Everest work he wrote: “The high peaks are lovely beyond description, but on an expedition they are the props, the background scenery to human endeavour.”
Images in the exhibition and book show exactly this: exhausted bodies, precarious crevasse crossings, and weather-beaten faces.
Emphasis on the human factor led to a subsequent focus on people and photojournalism.
Mr Gregory’s Melbourne-born wife Sue had also been a photographer and trekker prior to meeting him on a bus in Poland.
“I saw him cleaning his interchangeable lenses on the seat next to me and that was it!” she recalled.
Together they spent the next 20 years touring the world as Kodak ambassadors.
They also worked as freelance photojournalists and led photographic holidays before retiring to Australia.
The photographic works of Alfred Gregory are on exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art until 24 February along with copies of the book, Alfred Gregory: Photographs from Everest to Africa.
