Names: Lee Tulloch and Tony Amos

Years together: 37

Occupations: novelist and photographer

“I wanted to get married because it was completely uncool,” says Tony Amos. The photographer has been married to the novelist and travel editor Lee Tulloch for more than 30 years but says he proposed because marriage was “the most uncool thing you could do.”

The couple were introduced by the late photographer Stuart Campbell in 1982. Amos was 19, Tulloch was 27 and Campbell was quite the matchmaker. “He called himself the Dolly Levi of Rose Bay,” says Tulloch with a smile.

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Amos was in Sydney for some modelling and met Campbell on a photo shoot. Due to return to Melbourne, he dropped in to see the photographer at his home studio. Campbell was shooting a rock band, then a pair of drag queens showed up, followed by some film producers. “Stuart says ‘these people are never going to leave’.” He offered to set Amos up with Tulloch, offering a description that didn’t leave much to the imagination. “And I’m a 19-year-old boy so I go ‘well that sounds alright.’”

Campbell called Tulloch, insisting she come over. She was reluctant but eventually gave in. “So I arrived to see the rock band had gone and there were these two gay guys. And Tony. I thought, he’s done it to me again, it’s a room full of gay guys, because your gay best friends often do that. And I was so annoyed with him.”

However, she realised Amos wasn’t gay, and soon the crowd trickled away. Campbell cooked dinner for the pair – then promptly went to bed, leaving them staring at each other.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lee Tulloch and Tony Amos, photographed by Stuart Campbell in 1984. Photograph: Stuart Campbell

Amos suggested they rearrange everything in the house as payback. For the next few hours, they took pictures off the walls, emptied out drawers and moved everything around. “The next day Stuart wakes up and asks ‘What have you done to my house?’,” says Tulloch. “The fact that we had the same sense of humour, that immediately bonded us.”

They became inseparable and, after two months of interstate visits, moved in together. It was risky but worth it, says Tulloch. “Even though we hardly knew each other, there was some kind of faith [and a] common humour was established right then.”

Amos agrees. “[There was] this very clear sense of being complicit in adventure, or misadventure. For me, I was just smitten.” They were married two years later.

They were an unlikely couple. Their childhoods, for instance, were very different: Amos “went to school just to torture teachers”, while Tulloch was “Miss Goody Two Shoes”. But his disdain for authority was attractive, says Tulloch. “I was always being the good one. And I think he was being the bad [boy].”

Although they are very different people with different tastes, their personalities complement the other. “Someone who’s like [Tony] does need a consistency somewhere in their life,” she says. “And from my point of view, I could really be a stick in the mud. But he’s more adventurous ... his highs and lows are quite good for me, because I never know what he’s actually going to do.”

Another reason their relationship worked was because they were “interested in doing more than just sitting around establishing careers.” At the time, Tulloch was working in fashion magazines while he was working at Speedo and dabbling in photography. Then Tulloch was appointed editor of Australian Harper’s Bazaar. The job didn’t last –she was fired after nine issues for, in her words, “being a little too creative”.

It’s one of those things where you go, if you’re not looking after this person, who are you looking after? Tony Amos

The couple decided to move overseas, so Amos could assist and learn from international photographers while Tulloch wrote her first novel. Their shared sense of adventure cemented their relationship. Says Tulloch: “My feeling has always been, if you want to do something, work out what it is, and then just do it. There is no reason not to do it, and you’ll regret it if you don’t. And sometimes it seems foolish in some ways. Years later I think, oh, maybe we should have done something else. But of course, we shouldn’t.”

They settled in New York in 1985 and their daughter Lolita was born in 1988. “That’s probably the most challenging time for a couple,” says Tulloch. With their creative jobs, they could organise their lives around their child but it was tough on the relationship. “You’re both concentrating on the baby. So of course there’s less time you give to each other. And I think a lot of couples, when they’re so bound up with each other, that’s when it all can fall apart.”

Amos, who was 26 at the time, found it difficult. “When [Lolita] was a baby, it was detrimental to my work at that point, because I was interested in watching this little thing grow.” Eventually the couple returned to Australia, which added to the pressure. Says Amos: “Everything for me was New York at that point, so when I came back out here, I went from New York to ‘where am I?’” The only way through it was just to go through it. “Time,” says Amos. “It’s just time, it’s not optional.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lee Tulloch and Tony Amos in New York’s East Village in 1985. Photograph: Tony Amos

The couple learned how to deal with conflict, giving each other space and time when needed. Tulloch scoffs at that well-worn advice not to go to bed on an argument. “Forget that,” she says. “Sometimes poking a nest with a stick is not a good idea. You are individual people, and you really just have to go away from each other. I guess it’s a little bit of confidence that you’ll come back.” Amos agrees: “I was raised with that [idea] if you love something, you have to give it room.”

But they don’t let the silences go on for too long. “We probably had to have little sessions to discuss it. And knowing that one will be upset that it’s being raised, but usually, because we care about each other, we’re trying to make it work.”

They returned to New York a few years later and were living there on 11 September 2001. It was a devastating event for both of them. Their Chambers Street apartment was in the middle of ground zero and Tulloch witnessed the planes hitting the towers. “I realised that I had PTSD. I really did, I was the one who saw it happen. I was the one who ran through the streets,” she remembers.

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Meanwhile Amos, who had been away, couldn’t get back into Manhattan. Tulloch couldn’t get hold of him: “We were so apart. I remember going, where is he? I couldn’t even phone him till the end of the day, because the phones went down. But I was probably a little bit like, ‘why isn’t he as upset as I am?’ But he probably was in his own way, he was handling it differently.”

The decision to move back to Australia again was difficult. “That was probably the toughest one because I think Tony was willing to give it a chance, and I was like, ‘no, I can’t see how it’s going to work.’” In the long run, it brought them closer together. “It’s one of those things where you go, if you’re not looking after this person, who are you looking after?” says Amos. “If you can’t do that, what are you?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Amos, Lolita Amos and Lee Tulloch. Photograph: Robert Rosen/Tony Amos

They couple have always supported each other’s careers. “Tony often says to me, whatever you need, if you have to do that now, that’s what we are going to do,” says Tulloch. And while they are individuals, they are also a team. “I often look at other [successful] couples [who] are in the creative industry, it’s very much the same thing. They totally respect each other’s thing that they do, they allow them to do it.”

They also work together on travel stories – she writes and produces while he shoots. She doesn’t boss him around: “That wouldn’t work,” says Amos quickly. Instead she lets him get on with it “Because I know that he’s good enough to do it himself. He doesn’t need to be micromanaged.”

So what’s their secret for staying together? “You shouldn’t be looking for a life partner who is going to be your soulmate twin, a do-everything-together kind of love,” says Tulloch. “I think you really just have to say ‘I like this about [this person], I can’t change them and I’m not going to try and change them, can I live with it?’ That can be the decision.”

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Amos agrees: “One of the first things I recognised about Lee was that she’s not interested in telling me what to be.” He says there also has to be chemistry – both physical and intellectual – and curiosity. “Knowing the other person is still curious and hungry in some way. I couldn’t be with someone if I felt they had switched off.”

Their advice is to get away from each other once in a while. Says Tulloch: “Just go away and have another perspective and come back. A changing perspective is a very good thing, you get so familiar with each other, you know your own smell, you know what kind of things you’re probably going to say. You have friends in common, what you like to eat. You need to have a break, you need to actually look at the person again in a fresh way.”

Tulloch, who travels often in her job, says she misses Amos but it’s worth it. “I don’t miss him when I’m home, because he’s in the next room working. But I certainly miss him when I’m waiting to come home. So I think that’s OK, you always look forward to coming home to that person. And unless you go away, you don’t have that wonderful feeling.”

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