MISS DRIED FRUIT

Back in the 1920s  there were  no  P3  girls  in brief attire  in  the Australian media . Instead , there  were  glamour  postcards ,  like  this one showing  a   girl in a dazzling outfit  adorned  with  bunches of   grapes and   dried  fruit , promoting Sunraysia  produce.  Sun drenched  dried  fruit seems to be  hanging  from  the  hem of  her specially made dress - which you  don't see  dangling from  the skirts of  modern  misses.  It  could come  back into fashion , do you think ? This  model, whose name may have been Mabel,  kept  company with Little Normey (see  earlier post ) of  Snake Gully , not  far  from Irymple,Victoria.     

QUEEN PLAYS DRUMS-MOVE OVER SUPERSTAR GENE KRUPA

Members of the volunteer workforce at the Nightcliff Uniting Church Op Shop in Darwin are innovative and have many hidden skills . At Christmas time , Mary Penton, described as the Op Shop Queen , revealed that she can play the drums when a set of the musical instruments arrived on the premises as part of preparations for services at the church . There being no drumsticks with the kit , she improvised . Using wooden coathangers , she beat out a lively rhythm on the drums , see above . On December 10, 2011, Mary celebrated her 90th birthday and the Op Shop crew staged a special function to mark the event . At it a lighthearted ditty , composed by artist Shirley Downing, another skilled Op Shop hand , was rendered to the tune of  Sydney’s Hornsby Girls' High School song, where Mary and Shirley were both star pupils . During WW11 Mary was initially employed   inspecting  materials bought for the Forces . As a member of  the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force , she made a helicopter flight in the early 1950s.

THE STRANGE STORY BEHIND NORMEYS

Darwin resident, Jo Brandt,  displays a batch of Normeys she recently made as a special treat for morning tea at the  bespoke Nightcliff Uniting Church Op Shop. Made from sultanas, raisins, almonds and walnuts, they look like rumballs, and are bedded in coconut . Ms Brandt was raised on a farm at Irymple in Sunraysia and says Normeys were popular throughout the district. On being shown old sheet music from the Little Darwin  Collection  which mentioned Normeys, she set to and made some  of  the  rare  treat.

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There  was  a  time  in Australia's  history when confectionery with the “grotesque name” of  Normeys was  all  the  go . It was  made from dried fruit from the Sunraysia region and pushed by the dynamic entrepreneur , C.J. De Garis , Director of Publicity for the Australian Dried Fruit Association, Mildura, Victoria . With a flair for publicity and  full of big ideas , "Jack" De Garis pushed the sale of dried fruit , including “Good Little Normey Lolly” through advertisements , film , sheet music, cook books and  stunts . As far back as l920 he ran a full page advertisement in a magazine extolling the advantages of regular consumption of dried fruit and Little Normeys, the latter , he urged, should be kept on the office desk and become a habit  The advertisement claimed “Sun-Raysed” dried fruit enhanced the physical and mental capacity of consumers .

One “Big Stunt” De Garis pulled was a contest which in l920 had a one thousand pound , $2000 dollar, first prize, a large amount of money in those days .It was won by an Adelaide girl , the money handed over in the Adelaide Town Hall to a large audience at which the Sun- Raysed film was screened . As part of the energetic drive to get the public to eat more dried fruit, there were exhibits at important shows . Large amounts of dried fruit and The Good Little Normeys were sold at the Melbourne Royal Show . Using dried fruit , show cases were packed in designs of a map of Australia and the Australian coat of arms . De Garis was also an aviator and used the sky to advertise SUN-RAYSED , see below ,which  later changed to the regional name, Sunraysia . He also founded the provincial newspaper, The Sunraysia Daily , with a large staff , for which he wrote,  got involved in land development in Victoria and  WA , hoped to make millions through   oil exploration ,   dabbled  in  the  theatre .

Unfortunately, the lolly, reduced to just being called Normeys, struck a problem. If kept in hot and damp conditions for any length of time , a small grub appeared. Querulous growers began to criticise and attack De Garis when market conditions were bad . One asked why he called the confectionery The Good Little Normey. He replied because it made the questioner and others ask what were Normeys, sold for one shilling (10cents) in half pound packs . De Garis said the confectionery became so popular that every poor unfortunate boy or man , whose name was Norman , and who came into public notice, was called The Good Little Normey. This, he said , had applied to world famous men such as Norman Brookes , the Australian tennis wizard, Norman Ross ,the world’s champion swimmer and artist Norman Lindsay, whose pictures of nude women invariably caused controversy.

De Garis got into financial difficulties and faked his own suicide by drowning in Port Phillip on January 1925, leaving behind about 70 farewell letters . He was apprehended soon after on a boat bound for New Zealand . The following year , with debts amounting to $840,000 , he gassed himself . In his autobiographical novel Victories of Failure: A Business Romance , written under the pseudonym of K.J. Rogers, he dedicated the book in memory of his mother and his second wife and former secretary ,Violet May De Garis, of whom he said her brightness shone most resplendently in “THE DARKEST DAYS”- an indication of his  deep depression .

FRUITY UPDATE : Tennis ace Novak Djokovic took home a lot of “lolly” and the Norman Brookes Trophy after his latest triumph at the Australian Open . As pointed out earlier in this post, Brookes , like so many other Normans ,was called Normey because of  the successful Good Little Normeys campaign.

WARNING ABOUT TERRITORY COMMUNISTS-Ongoing biography of Crusading Editor, "Big Jim" Bowditch

An ASIO report, parts of which were blanked out , stated that a man said to have travelled the world and had “ an intense hatred for Communism ” had made contact . This man had stated he thought “ Communism was rather thick in the Territory”. He had met several Communists and would like to contact the Security Service . Three men had been named by the man-James Frederick Bowditch ; a reporter, commonly called “ Bluey ” and a travelling optometrist and optician. Apparently nothing was known about  Bluey.

Bowditch, of course ,was the subject of expanding files. In the case of the optician , formerly of Melbourne , he allegedly praised Communism and stated that he had travelled through Sibera(sic) and by what he had seen there , “ Communism wasn’t too bad.” This led to the stake out of a Melbourne block of flats trying to track him down . It turned out he was the brother of a Melbourne skin specialist.

While actively trying to enrol new members in the clerks’ union, Bowditch had spoken to a young girl , Betty Hodgson, working in Loutit’s store. She is pictured above standing between Jim and her father at the Alice Springs railway station,in the  l950s,  the occasion possibly the first time the Ghan train arrived pulled by a diesel electric  loco.

Betty was the daughter of a fullblood Aborigine, Myra Hull , and Englishman Charles Deans “ Geordie ” Hodgson. Betty’s father, a strict man , came to Australia at the age of 17 and worked as a fettler on the railway. He had married her mother,a member of the Arabanna Tribe, when she was l6. Betty , one of 13 children , was born at Oodnadatta , outback South Australia, in l932. To make ends meet, her father ran an SP betting business and Betty remembered him burying money in tins when they lived at Marree. Marree was a town divided into three distinct areas: one for Afghans, another for railway workers and the third the commercial area . Her father could not take her mother into the pub with him because of the law. However, Betty worked in the Marree Pub as a house maid .

BRIGHT BETTY

Believing  Betty to be  bright, her father sent her to a  Catholic boarding school , St. Dominic’s Priory School ,  North  Adelaide. During  four years there she  was taught shorthand , typing, French, English and geography . She also learned how to play the piano ; her brother Douglas , who became a jockey and railway worker, described  Betty as the family’s “only silvertail.”

Her father was transferred to Alice Springs as a clerk in the office and they lived in a railway house . A regular drinker at Underdown’s pub , there was a spot at the bar known as “ Geordie’s Corner. ” When Betty’s parents split up, she came home from Adelaide to look after the family . At home, she often heard her father talk abut a  man called Jim  Bowditch.

She found it hard to get work in Alice ; for a time she was employed as a shorthand typist in the Animal Industry Branch. Later on , she worked in the office of a transport company. Bowditch frequently spoke to her in Loutit’s shop and began to take her out on his ex- Army BSA motorbike. That the editor of the paper was riding around town with an attractive young half-caste on the pillion seat did not go unnoticed; tongues wagged.

And ASIO noted in June l952 that Bowditch was “currently associating with a half-caste woman called Hodgson ”. One day, Jim ,with Betty on the back of the motorcycle , was involved in a collision with a car. Henceforth they travelled in a car for safety .

At times, Jim and Betty went to the residence of  his former boss at Works and Housing, D. D. Smith,  and were always made feel welcome. Betty was athletic and played basketball , hockey  and  tennis . In 1948 she had been a member of a team which beat Darwin in basketball. After she met Jim, Betty regularly watched him play cricket each Sunday. Jim also played tennis.

ALICE SOCIAL  LIFE

 Betty recalled   that  they often went to the Memorial Club where he gathered  social notes for the paper.  While he  exchanged  small talk in the process , he was  ever ready to discuss politics with anybody .    Many people converged on the club at weekends and some cattlemen came in with their wives. Claims were made that Bowditch deliberately took Betty to the club to confront the “ colour bar”. Betty said this was not so,  as far as she knew . Jim said he liked Betty , whom he described as most attractive -“ some doll ”- and just took her with him wherever he went. However, in one recorded interview, Bowditch said he did take Betty to the Memorial Club to confront  the  colour bar.

While there was no written rule against taking “ coloureds ” to the club, it was frowned upon . It must be said in fairness that some prominent members of the club said they would walk out if “coloured ”members of a Darwin football team on a visit to Alice were not allowed into the club. The footballeres  were subsequently allowed in and there was no trouble as a result.

Apart from some club members frowning on the entry of “coloureds ”, there was also an  anti- “ foreigner ” attitude .   Italians, in particular, had a difficult time . Some Italians who did eventually gain membership found that they were ignored and left to sit in a group on their own. The attitude to foreigners irked Bowditch’s  journalist friend, Alan Wauchope , so much that he wrote a letter to the paper on the subject. In it , he said he was concerned to learn that the Memorial Club, like another club in town, had decided not to admit foreigners as members unless they first produced naturalization papers. He considered this action a typical insular attitude calculated to do untold harm to the government’s policy of friendly assimilation of “ screened foreigners. ”

 POOH-BAHS & RAJAHS  

Just to make it abundantly clear what he felt , Wauchope said it was an instance of “ tinpot snobbery , lack of vision , and a Pooh-Bah outlook engendered possibly by a brief residence abroad and membership of some decadent club where rigid lines of demarcation left a knot of befuddled Colonel Blimps in splendid isolation . ” Furthermore, he went on to say that with the speed of modern travel and the shrinking of distances foreigners were now our neighbours.

He continued : “ I have no doubt that if a distinguished ‘ foreigner’ were to visit Alice, whether he be the inkiest of Rajah Bong , or whitest of Russian, the leaders of the Memorial Club would fall over themselves to push and to bask in his reflected glory . ” Obviously, his letter caused anger at the Memorial Club ; there may even have been a threat of legal action because Wauchope subsequently wrote that he had not been referring to the club’s current committee –one member being lawyer Phil Rice – which was doing a good job . NEXT : The religious horn blower.

BLUE MONSOON -By Jackson"Troppo" Pollock

IN THE WAKE OF A GREAT REPORTER

There was a time in Darwin when the Revolution reared its head at the Murdoch owned Northern Territory News. The person who played a large part in this capitalist shock was Marxist journalist , the late John Loizou. It came in the form of workers’ participation in the running of the paper, which evolved out of the strike over the replacement of James Frederick Bowditch as editor of the paper.

Loizou briefed the Australian Journalists’ Association in Sydney in the negotiations . He pointed out that in a recent statement Rupert Murdoch had said the management of a newspaper was obligated to make sure it was run in a business like fashion. The AJA, Loizou said, should use this same argument and say journalists on a paper should have a say in the running of the editorial side  ,especially if they thought management action was or could damage the publication ,  financially and in the eyes of its readers.

It was John’s proud boast that workers were given a say in the running of the paper for the first time in Australia . What is more , he chortled, the company negotiators in Sydney had not realised the importance of the agreement in the first instance . This whiff of Danny the Red did not last long as Cyclone Tracy blew the place apart ; journalists, including John, were scattered down south, the presses stopped running for a time at the NT News. When he finally made it back to Darwin , Loizou worked for the Darwin Council  in the street labour team , there being no job for him at the News .  However, being a top notch journalist , the News did re-employ him .

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My contact  with John spanned more than half a century. I knew him when he first lobbed in town from Melbourne with the ABC , a fit footballer , then known as  John Sparkes ( his stepfather’s surname ), adept at shorthand , which I had never mastered . At one stage , I was asked if I would recommend John as editor of the independent newspaper , Darwin Star . I did , he was appointed and the proprietors told me that , of all the editors , his time at the helm had been the smoothest and most financially productive . The two Darwin papers, naturally, were locked in a deadly circulation and revenue battle.

There was a lively column in the Darwin Star - Scurrilous - which John may have started . Once it took a shot at the editor of the NT News, John Hogan, over his attendance at Friday Club luncheons. Hogan was upset and complained to the Press Council. I well remember John ringing me, chuckling in his distinctive  way, and reading out Hogan’s letter of complaint, a copy of which I recently came across in my files.

On another occasion, he rang , laughing so much it was hard to understand what he was saying , and blurted out hilarious details about an incident in which the late Freddy Fogarty , who often went the knuckle , had confronted a British butterfly collector armed with a net who had trespassed on Kulaluk land. Methinks the net was snatched from the uppity butterfly man and brought down over his head.

When I was secretary of the Darwin sub-branch of the Queensland AJA,I don’t think John was ever a financial member .This did not prevent him from attending meetings, being very vocal and becoming disgruntled when told he could not vote on an issue .

Over the years , John and I had many discussions and he often made startling statements , like his claim that he could sail a boat to Mozambique and pick up a printing press  and bring it back to Darwin. That brings to mind the time he was  the skipper of the  former  drug boat  Mariana  which he was restoring on the hard at Doctor’s Gully. Being a good Marxist captain , he said the vessel would be run on democratic lines , all  those who came aboard and  lingered able to cast a vote on how things were run .  This was fine in theory, but one night he ordered everybody off  after some of the  motley crew annoyed him.

John has been the subject of a premature wake in Darwin. Wake number 2 will take place after his funeral February 8-another opportunity to shout," Up the workers !" -(Peter Simon)

SHIPPING NEWS UNREPORTED

This  barnacle  encrusted  and Toledo worm riddled  scribe has had a long association with  the waterfront as a reporter in Sydney, Darwin, Cairns, Auckland, Adelaide , starting  by  cleaning with creosote the bilge of a mother boat in a Sydney –Hobart yacht race , covering  the  start for  a  newspaper  from a ferry of  one of the races , going out in the boat which took Customs and Health officials to meet incoming passenger ships at the entrance to Sydney Harbour in the l950s.

 In Darwin I covered church rounds, courts , police and the  most interesting shipping round, which included the Japanese salvage operations , a 1960 trip to Portuguese Timor as a deckhand when oil was struck by an American drilling company , and a voyage along the Arnhem Land coast in a Methodist supply lugger ( chundered a lot  along the way).

The waterfront beat in Cairns took me down the so-called rough  Barbary Coast , provided encounters with the builders of strange boats ,a  search for the Australian  Tarzan , and Kay’s  Kimino , the owner of the said garment  being a Japanese lady  from which  winning tickets in  a  pub raffle were regularly drawn . In New Zealand , I went out with shark fishermen and tracked down a coffin boat sailor , met people involved in the Pirate Radio Ship –Radio Hauraki- and inspected the replica of Bligh’s Bounty when it visited the country. Incidently,  bet you do not know that during WW11  dastardly Germans  on  submarines  slipped  ashore  and  milked   Kiwi cows  at  night ?

Adelaide brought me into contact with enthusiasts with fabulous martime history collections and I  bought at auction  the  personal papers and books of  a sailor  who will be the subject of extensive coverage  in Little Darwin  sometime this year.

No reporter in Darwin seems to really cover shipping news, the  throbbing Brando Beat. This statement is based on observations  of   the upsurge in harbour activity in the past six months and discussions with people involved in waterfront activities. There is an opening for a reporter like Quoyle , the former New York State newsman, central figure in the 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning book , THE SHIPPING NEWS, by E. Annie Proulx, to chronicle the  diverse maritime activity taking place in the port. In visual observations from shore in recent weeks , naval craft were seen plainly taking part in vessel escort duties . Early one Saturday morning naval ships were seen steaming in line and then smaller vessels detached themselves and did manoeuvres. This raises many question . Vessels of all shapes and sizes move about the harbour , day and night . Following   the strange episode at the Larrakeyah naval base in which firearms were stolen from a patrol boat , a fishing boat was seen soon  after  near the entrance to the facility. American naval authorities, with great justification , I am sure , would not allow an innocent looking tinny near the entrance to any of its bases .

Last year , a ship bearing the clearly visible name JUMBO on its hull was seen in port . A quick Google check revealed that Jumbo, a Dutch based outfit, specialises in heavy lifting cranes , with a fleet of vessels capable of lifting 500 tonnes to 1800 tonnes . Little Darwin took a photo of the Jumbo in the harbour and expected to see the local media do a report on this ship and its innovative company. The floating  Jumbo, however, went unnoticed by the media pack. The  mighty dredge which arrived to deepen the harbour  to enable larger gas tankers entry received initial media attention , then seemed to sink with all hands.    It is an astonishing piece of equipment; technically minded persons have spoken almost in awe at the shipboard setup.

Where are the  obvious follow up stories about the brand new pilot boat which went aground the day after it was commissioned ? Cruise ships come and go almost without mention and tourists , on occasions, arrive in town to find few shops open , which reveals poor liaison between the ships, the tourist industry and local business. Talk to the colourful people whose fishing vessels flock together in what is known as the Duck Pond and innumerable stories , some outrageous, emerge . At night, there are frequently scenes of activity at Frances Bay as small coastal vessels load up. An interview with the Darwin Port Authority about the increased activity and the future outlook would make interesting reading . Doing the shipping news can be most rewarding and productive if you actually keep in contact with shipping agents, get out of the office, go to the wharves , speak to the waterside workers , the captains, crew members and spot a vessel with JUMBO emblazoned on its hull. What looked like a Chinese tramp steamer slid into port during our watch ,without mention in the media . Wonder where it came from, what it was doing here? -(Peter Simon)