INSIDE COAST’S SOCIAL SCENE
STORIES FROM BEHIND THE CAMERA WITH SOCIAL SNAPPERS REGINA KING AND PETER FLOWERS
It was 1975 and performing showgirl, single mother and Gold Coast social photographer extraordinaire Regina King was engaged to be married. The invitations had been sent out and her life was a whirl of glamorous parties with a who’s who of the glitter strip eager to have Regina immortalise their revelries in the Gold Coast Bulletin.
As if caught in a trance by her camera flash, people could never seem to help themselves when it came to confiding gossip to Regina.
And so it was that she found herself accompanying a girlfriend to Penthouse Nightclub to meet her friend’s secret lover.
“She was having an affair with a married man,” Regina says.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to go in there’, but she said, ‘Just walk in there with me’. So I did and that was when I met Peter who had also been dragged along by the other man.”
With their respective friends otherwise occupied, it was up to Regina and Peter, who was only 21 at the time, to amuse themselves.
One drink was all it took to woo the older woman (generations of party goers have tried and failed to calculate Regina’s exact vintage) and the match was made.
As a cheeky Regina recalled in her Bulletin column in 2001, the relationship was chaste – at first.
“Believe it or not, we didn’t become lovers in the true sense of the word until six months later and this wonderful affair has lasted and strengthened for 26 years,” she wrote.
“The only tragedy of our love affair was this wonderful antique brass bed that I purchased from Wayne Furness’s antique auction. It was my prize possession. Peter is exactly two metres tall and the bed, sadly, was slightly shorter. One night, his foot became entangled with the bottom post, he gave one almighty kick and my expensive bed came thundering down.”
When Peter met Regina her showgirl days were coming to an end. She’d begun dabbling in photography five years earlier, selling prints to tourists on the beach or fashioning them into keyrings for restaurant patrons. “When my contract was up performing (as a showgirl) at Surfers Paradise Hotel I was offered a job at Coolangatta as the only woman in an all-male review,” Regina says.
“I said, ‘I’ll take it’. I had to put food on the table for my son.
“But what I really wanted was to take photos. I knew one of the boys was very taken by another of the boys and wanted to be a part of the show so I said, ‘You’re about the same height as me and you want to be an actor. You should dress up as me in drag and I’ll take the photos instead’.”
Peter’s recollection of their courtship is much more pragmatic.
“We just got on,” Peter says. “Everybody gets all complicated but it’s really very simple.”
He also thinks talk about their age difference is hilarious. “Yes, I was young when we met. I was six. A big six,” Peter says gesturing to his substantial height compared to that of his diminutive love. “And Regina, well, I just tell everyone she’s in her early hundreds.”
“The problem is some of them believe him,” Regina says in mock outrage.
With her photographic career on the rise, it turned out a practical man was precisely what Regina needed. She was in increasing demand, but had no idea what to do with her newfound riches. She didn’t have a bank account and so every time she and her son Graeme would leave their Southport home – the same place where Peter and Regina still live to this day – they’d hide the money in a different location.
“One day I put it all in the oven and then forgot about it,” Regina says “I turned it on and burnt the lot.” With former banker Peter to the rescue when it came to her account keeping, Regina decided to turn her hand to shooting weddings on the weekends.
There was the time developer Norm Rix’s son Greg married his wife Wendy and the humidity from the rainy day made their spectacular three-tier cake collapse in a pile of fondant and tears.
But the most memorable occasion was a bride whose reception was at the Marriott and who wanted to be photographed prior to her ceremony alongside the hotel’s famous winding waterways. It ended in disaster with the poor woman soaked from the neck down.
“I said to her, ‘Don’t you dare cry or you’ll ruin your make-up’,” Regina says. “We got every hairdryer from every room in the place and pointed it at her dress and got her dried off.
“Another time the wedding was so secretive and I couldn’t work out why. Then I saw the groom and I realised. Oh my God. He’s already married. I knew because I’d done that wedding as well.”
Regina and Peter have met their share of celebrities.
They were there at the infamous shindig where style icon Zsa Zsa Gabor stormed out because game show host Tony Barber referred to her as a “septuagenarian”.
The pair also counted Christopher Skase and Peter Foster among their circle even if the latter of the two’s talent for telling tall tales extended to his social life.
“Peter Foster once said to me, ‘I’m going to have Elton John in my unit’,” Regina says.
“What he said I could do was climb up on to the balcony of the unit next door, which was empty, and I’d be able to see them inside.
“Well I got up there and was perched like that for ages. Of course none of it happened.”
After 40 years of capturing smiles and imaginations with their juicy gossip pieces, some things never change. Regina still calls the shots and takes them too with here camera ever poised in front of her face with a cheery “yoohoo”.
The biggest difference, according to Peter, is the people and he knows precisely what to blame.
“Selfies have ruined everything,” Peter says. “People don’t want to smile, don’t want to show their teeth, don’t want to be photographed on this side or that side.
“Not only are they getting odder and odder but their eyebrows don’t move anymore. People are getting seriously weird these days.”