“It makes me feel wonderful, going back and having a look at photos of me in particular, when I was a little boy,” he says, breaking into song while cataloguing folders of loose ends such as “Christmas, Dubbo, 1999,” the trailblazing University of New England chancellor Pat O’Shane at a graduation ceremony, birthday parties and son Tim’s athletics trophies.
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He flicks through a copy of his biography, by friend and retired journalist Tim Dobbyn, and pauses on a photo of his cousins wagging school in 1966, calling it his favourite.
He has not stopped taking photographs since falling in love with the smell of the chemicals and magic of watching an image take shape in a dark room, although the Nikon on the desk in front of him is digital.
Bishop has a knack for being in the right place and an easy rapport with people, but says it’s important to “keep your thoughts to yourself” and mimes swerving left and right.
He does not mind sharing his thoughts on US President Donald Trump: “I think he’s wonderful. Not because he plays golf. I’d like to go and have a game with him on one of his golf courses.
“I haven’t played for a couple of years, I’ve had a few illnesses.”
Bishop won an award for a front-page Herald photograph capturing a boy’s dash to hospital. He had his own recently, when the Royal Flying Doctor Service took him to Dubbo, where he was “wobbly”, then to Sydney where he developed blood poisoning.
“Things weren’t going real good. I didn’t know where I was. If it wasn’t for my daughter Rosemary … she got up someone and chased them up. I was on a drip and I got poisoned. Septicemia. Not many come back after that.”
The exhibition at the State Library of NSW opens to the public on Saturday. Tim Dobbyn’s biography of Bishop, Black, White + Colour (Ginninderra Press), is out now.