Australian Ballet as stills photographer on Robert Helpmann's and Rudoph Nureyev's Don Quixote, through which he met Hungarian actor and filmmaker Tibor Markus who was to produce Cox's first feature Illuminations. In the late 1960s Cox travelled to Papua New Guinea with Ulli Beier whose interest was indigenous poetry, drama and creative writing. In the resulting 1971 book Cox's photographs of village life were set to poems written by Beier's students. Beier and Cox later published a book on Mirka Mora Also in 1971, Cox won a trip to London in the "Age of Aquarius" contest for professional photographers organised by Ilford (Australia) Pty. Ltd. Lecturer in film Cox was appointed as a teacher of photography at Prahran College of Advanced Education in 1969, and with little experience in the medium, apart from making short Super 8 movies with friend Bernie Eddy, he went on to become the lecturer in cinematography, an experience he recalls in his autobiography as formative: Apart from the few Super-8 movies I had made and some more serious attempts on 16mm, I knew nothing about filmmaking. I was forced to stay one step ahead of the students. That's how I became a filmmaker. The film course received some $15,000 funding in August 1970 (a value of $180,000 in 2019) with which Head of the Art School Ted Worsley purchased cine cameras, a Steenbeck editing suite, film processor and Nagra tape deck. Always working with small budgets, Cox used the equipment in making The Journey (1972) and Illuminations (1975), with Prahran drama lecturer Alan Money on the cast, and in 1994 featured 43 paintings by colleague Eleanor Hart in Touch Me. Students were recruited, both as practical education for them and as a saving for the budding director, to serve as the film crews on Cox's Mirka (1970), and documentaries All Set Backstage (1974), We Are All Alone My Dear (1975), and For a Child Called Michael (1980). We Are All Alone My Dear, a portrait of novelist Jean Campbell in a home for the elderly, was made with $1,000 and brought Cox his first breakthrough, with an award for documentary film. Cox turned his unneeded photography studio over to The Photographers' Gallery and Workshop which he founded with Ingeborg Tyssen, John F. Williams and Rod McNicoll in 1973. He remained at Prahran College until 1980 and with Athol Shmith and John Cato influenced a number