On April 21st, 1964, around 4pm, a mid autumn afternoon in the city of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, a bright light came into this world. A child christened Gregory Leo Francis Hilleard. Note the two papal middle names.
Greg was the surprise baby. The baby brother to two brothers and two sisters who were 7-18 years older than the latest addition to the Hilleard family. Mum sometimes got the sads and would ship little Gregory off to his older sister in Tasmania for school holidays. Greg felt that his formative childhood took place on Bruny Island/lunawanna-alonnah with the Finnish community his older sister had married into, even though he did grow up in Brisbane. Shooting rabbits, fishing, boating, having saunas. A wild and unique freedom for a gentle but wild child.
A natural athlete, (his father was state 400m champion, but World War II called, and off to New Guinea) Greg was a great skateboarder, and did enjoy a surf, but despised the gritty feeling of sand at the beach with a passion.
Mid 1990’s and 2000s Greg took to graf writing, stickers and stenciling. Over the years he had had multiple tags, but is best known as Reks or ElRekso. He emptied spray cans in Melbourne’s Hozier Lane. His work was collected by the Australian National Gallery as part of the Space Invaders Exhibition in 2006. He completed private and commercial commissions all over Brisbane. His motifs often were his children’s faces.
He fathered four truly amazing human beings, (not by me, by another fabulous brunette with great cheekbones). He loved his children deeply, this can never be understated.
Music was the thing. The everything. Making music and listening to music. Talking and reading about music. His musical taste was eclectic as heck and far reaching. Greg’s first instrument was the drums at school. He could play anything, guitar, banjo, anything with strings, keyboards, wind instruments. His natural singing voice was the perfect rock tenor. Even if the instrument was broken (how did that happen?!) he could elicit something sonically wonderful out of it. From his early twenties onwards he was never not in a band. Playing with friends across decades upon Brisbane’s wobbly verandahs, at pubs and parties. Strontium Dog, The Niel Armstrong Experience, Tripod, The Standing Eight Counts, The Lost Domain, to name but a few of the ensembles. He did solo work, somewhat reluctantly, under the Papa Lord God moniker. Greg was a team player who worked well with others. He made outsider music that let’s you in.
Greg survived the great antipodean 1990s heroin epidemic that took out many of our contemporaries. Both wild at heart and tender-hearted, a complicated concoction of the will to create and survive and the urge to destroy. Greg had a strong sense of social justice, a quick and sharp wit with a sublime sense of the ridiculous. A storyteller extraordinaire and always a well dressed raconteur. It was a joy going out and showing one another off.
Greg would tell you straight to your face that he was as mad as a cut snake, (that’s Australian slang for “I have a mental illness”) while buying you a beer he couldn’t afford, bumming your smokes, stealing your girlfriend and giving you the shirt off his back.
Endlessly Terence Stamp handsome through the ages, I loved gazing upon Greg’s middle aged face – seeing the precocious golden haired child that loved riding his bmx and obsessively making model World War II dioramas. And glimpsing the older, beautifully aged man and master of multiple creative forces, who kept both his devils and angels close by, a la Rilke.
On January 15th, 2022 at 8pm, a bright light suddenly left this world. A giant undersea volcano exploded north of Tonga, and so did the aortic aneurysm lurking in Greg’s heart.
The Aurora Australis went gangbusters over southern Tasmania (where we were living) the night he left. It was a lot of incredible natural energy. Like him.
“The greatest thing
you’ll ever learn
Is just to love
and be loved
in return” *
And that you did, Greg
Rest in Power, my love.
Anita,
Consort.
*”Nature Boy”
lyric by eden ahbez