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Peter Mclisky went to art school in his native New Zealand in the late 1960s when pop art ruled, advertising was cool, and graphic design was tactile.
"We used to use drawing boards - there were no computers," he says. "It was all scalpel knives and wax and glue and rulers and T-squares and set squares, and that was really fun - it was more like drafting. It was very precise work, using scalpels [to do] paste ups with type. Totally different idea to what you do now with graphics.
"My last few years of graphics kind of turned me off, because it was just sort of sitting behind a computer and you weren't doing anything with your hands. That's why I was doing sculpture work at the same time, probably. I needed to."
Mclisky got his first job in the ad industry in 1969. Over the next three decades he landed fun roles in advertising and design studios from Auckland to London, Paris, Sydney and finally, in 1983, Melbourne, doing everything from graphic design to set design for theatre, graphics for television, model-making for architects, illustration for Vogue, and art direction for newspapers and magazines such as Outrage.
Twenty years later he still gets visibly excited showing people around his studio at the old Boyd School in Southbank. It's inhabited by a huge cast of characters - not just his familiar giant rabbits , but many other highly graphic silhouettes - most of which are cleverly supported without the need for welding by their own shadows