Best Australian Yarns

by Haynes, Jim

  He left the UK during World War I because he didn’t believe in war and then joined up in the USA and played oboe and saxophone in an army band.

  Grainger met the Swedish artist and poet Ella Viola Ström, and fell in love at first sight. He had her paged on a ship and decided to marry her. Their wedding took place on 9 August 1928 on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl in front of 20,000 people.

  Perhaps it’s easier to understand Percy if we look at his mother. Grainger was born in Melbourne in 1882 and his mother Rose was a very well-educated and cultured woman, who was also domineering and possessive. While pregnant, she allocated time each day to stare at a statue of a Greek god in the belief it would pass some of its qualities to her child.

  Percy had blue eyes and brilliant orange hair and spent less than three months in school after refusing to attend because he was teased. He was home schooled by his mother who was a strict disciplinarian.

  Grainger gave his first public piano recital at the age of twelve and critics hailed him as a new prodigy. He excelled in languages and his correspondence shows he was fluent in eleven foreign languages including Icelandic and Russian.

  Grainger’s friend, composer Edvard Grieg, considered Percy the greatest musical genius of his time. He was a pioneer folk song collector, brilliant concert pianist, and an inventor of machines which played atonal and non-sequential music.

  He is buried in West Terrace cemetery, Adelaide, with his mother.

  There is no doubt Percy’s near madness stemmed from and revolved around his mother who had contracted syphilis from her husband early in their marriage. After Percy’s birth, she refused to touch him until he was five years old, for fear of passing the disease on to him.

  In 1890, Grainger’s father took a sea voyage in order to improve his health and never lived with wife and child again. Rose wrote to Grainger warning him not to touch his father if they should meet. His father died in 1917 of tertiary syphilis.

  Rose committed suicide in 1922 by jumping from the building where her son’s manager, Antonia Sawyer, had an office. After his mother’s death, Grainger found a letter that she had written to him the day before she took her life, explaining her suicide was caused by accusations of incest.

  Grainger kept the letter for many years in a cylinder he wore around his neck. He later compiled an album containing photos of his mother (including several of her in her coffin), and had thousands of copies made and distributed to friends.

  He donated many photos of himself being whipped and some whips and bloodstained shirts to the museum at Melbourne University and requested that his bones be used as a wind chime at the museum.

  His mother’s gravestone reads ‘Wise, wonderful, devoted, angelic mother’ and, in spite of all his weirdness, his friends and colleagues universally described him as ‘the happiest of people’.

  JH

  ARTHUR STACE

  Mr Eternity

  Arthur Stace was born in Balmain, the child of alcoholics. In order to survive, he resorted to stealing bread and milk and searching for scraps of food in bins. By the age of twelve, Arthur, with virtually no formal schooling, had become a state ward. As a teenager, he became an alcoholic and was subsequently sent to jail at fifteen. Afterwards, he worked as a look-out for a two-up school. In his twenties, he was a scout for his sisters, who were prostitutes.

  Arthur Stace was converted to Christianity on the night of 6 August 1930, after hearing an inspirational sermon by R.B.S. Hammond at St Barnabas Church on Broadway. Inspired by the words, he became enamoured with the notion of eternity. Two years later, on 14 November 1932, Arthur was inspired by a sermon by evangelist John G. Ridley on ‘The Echoes of Eternity’ from Isaiah 57:15: ‘For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit . . .’

  John Ridley’s words, ‘Eternity, Eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney. You’ve got to meet it, where will you spend Eternity?’ would prove crucial in Stace’s decision to tell others about his faith. In an interview, Arthur Stace said, ‘Eternity went ringing through my brain and suddenly I began crying and felt a powerful call from the Lord to write Eternity.’ Even though he was illiterate and could hardly write his own name legibly, the word ‘Eternity’, ‘came out smoothly, in a beautiful copperplate script. ‘I couldn’t understand it,’ he said, ‘and I still can’t.’

  After eight or nine years, he tried to write something else, ‘Obey God’, and then, five years later, ‘God or Sin’, but he could not bring himself to stop writing ‘Eternity’. Sydney Council brought him to the attention of the police as they had rules about the defacing of pavements, so much so that he narrowly avoided arrest around twenty-four times. Each time he was caught, he responded with, ‘But I had permission from a higher source.’

  Several mornings a week for the next thirty-five years, Arthur would leave his wife, Pearl, and their home in Bulwarra Road, Pyrmont, around five o’clock in the morning to go around the streets and chalk the word ‘Eternity’ on footpaths, train station entrances and anywhere else he could think of. It is estimated that he wrote the word around 500,000 times over the thirty-five years. Workers arriving in the city would see the word freshly written, but not the writer, and so, ‘The man who writes “Eternity” ’ became a legend in Sydney.

  The mystery was solved when Reverend Lisle M. Thompson, who preached at the church where Arthur worked as a cleaner, saw him take a piece of chalk from his pocket and write the word on the footpath.

  Arthur Stace died in a nursing home at the age of eighty-three on 30 July 1967. He bequeathed his body to Sydney University; subsequently, his remains were buried with those of his wife at Botany Cemetery around two years later.

  One of Arthur Stace’s iconic ‘Eternity’ signs, which he chalked on a piece of cardboard for a fellow parishioner is in the National Museum in Canberra. The museum also has an Eternity Gallery, inspired by Arthur Stace’s story, which features fifty personal stories from ordinary and extraordinary Australians. The stories are tied together by emotional themes including joy, fear, separation, chance and loneliness, which are all elements of Stace’s story.

  In Sydney today, the word ‘Eternity’ can still be seen written in three places. It is on Stace’s gravestone in Botany Cemetery and inside the bell in the GPO clock tower, which had been dismantled during World War II. When the clock tower was rebuilt in the 1960s, the bell was brought out of storage and, as the workmen were installing it, they noticed, inside the bell, the word ‘Eternity’ in Stace’s chalk. This is the only surviving ‘Eternity’ in Stace’s own hand in Sydney. (No one ever found out how Stace had been able to get to the bell, which had been sealed up.)

  The third place you might see the word is in Town Hall Square. When the area was redeveloped in the 1970s, a wrought aluminium replica of the word in Stace’s original copperplate handwriting was embedded in the footpath near a fountain as an eternal memorial to Arthur Stace.

  As a tribute to Stace, the Harbour Bridge was lit up with the word ‘Eternity’ as part of the celebrations for the beginning of the year 2000.

  JH

  HUBERT WILKINS

  The Aussie Who Was Scattered at the North Pole

  Hubert Wilkins was born in 1888, the youngest in a family of thirteen children, on a sheep station at Netfield, 150 kilometres north of Adelaide.

  When he was fifteen, the family moved to Adelaide and he enrolled in courses, which he never completed, at the School of Mines and the university. He moved to Sydney instead, and worked in Australia’s pioneer film industry, then left for the UK to work making newsreels and filming events such as the Balkans War in 1912.

  Wilkins made his first trip to the Arctic with a Canadian expedition in 1913 and photographed thousands of miles of previously unexplored territory. When he returned to Point Barrow, Alaska, in 1916, he was told the world had been at war for two
years.

  He was appointed official photographer for Australia’s War Records Office and filmed the fighting on the Western Front. Although Wilkins refused to carry firearms, he was the only Australian photographer, in any war, to receive a combat decoration. He was awarded the Military Cross twice, firstly for rescuing wounded soldiers at the Battle of Ypres and secondly after he assumed command of a group of American soldiers whose officers had been killed, and directed them until support arrived. After the war, he made a photographic record of the battlefields of Gallipoli.

  Wilkins then joined Dr John Cope on the Imperial Antarctic Expedition. After that, he was appointed as naturalist on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s last expedition to the Antarctic and this led to the British Museum of Natural History offering him an expedition of his own to collect flora and fauna from outback Australia and the islands of Torres Strait. He did that for two years and then told the museum he wanted to work in the polar regions again.

  With pilot Carl Ben Eielson, he was the first to fly across the Arctic Sea and the two men became international celebrities. The two of them then went on to explore Antarctica in 1928 and were the first men to fly a plane in Antarctica and map land that had never been seen before.

  Wilkins was knighted and awarded the Patron’s medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London and the Samuel Finley Breese Morse medal of the American Geographical Society and was on the world’s largest airship, Graf Zeppelin, on the first around-the-world flight and was aboard the airship Hindenburg on its maiden voyage from Germany to America.

  He then decided to take a submarine under the Arctic ice to the North Pole. Although the submarine, Nautilus, broke down and didn’t quite make it, Wilkins proved it was possible to journey under the polar ice cap.

  At the outbreak of World War II, Wilkins offered his services to the Australian war effort.

  The Australian government could find no use for a polar explorer, now aged over fifty, but the US army employed him to teach survival skills to soldiers and, after the war, he remained as a consultant to the US army and navy, developing nuclear submarines for operations in the Arctic.

  Wilkins died in 1958 and, on 17 March 1959, the nuclear submarine USS Skate became the first submarine to surface at the North Pole, where the crew held a memorial service and scattered the ashes of Sir Hubert Wilkins.

  JH

  ANNETTE KELLERMAN

  The Perfect Woman

  Swimmer, athlete, dancer, diver, actress, entertainer, author, designer, fitness expert, model, women’s liberator, childhood cripple and movie star, Annette Kellerman was born in 1886. Her violinist father, Frederick, and her French-born mother, pianist and music teacher Alice, lived in the inner Sydney suburb of Marrickville.

  Kellerman was crippled by rickets, a disease caused by vitamin deficiency, at the age of two and had to wear heavy leg braces until she was seven to prevent her legs from bowing. She started swimming on doctor’s advice at Cavill’s Baths at Lavender Bay. She liked swimming and her legs responded so well that at sixteen she was the women’s 100 metres world record holder.

  When the family moved to Melbourne, Kellerman gave swimming and diving exhibitions at the Melbourne baths, performed a mermaid act at an entertainment park and did two shows a day at the Exhibition Aquarium, where she swam in a glass tank full of fish.

  In 1902, when Annette and her father went to England, she held all the world’s records for women’s swimming.

  Kellerman soon began giving demonstrations. She swam 42 kilometres down the Thames in five hours, went to France and raced seventeen men down the Seine and finished third, and was the first woman to attempt to swim the English Channel. She tried three times but never made it. ‘I had the endurance,’ she said, ‘but not the brute strength.’

  Annette Kellerman almost single-handedly liberated women from stuffy Victorian dress codes. For her stage act and exhibitions, she made herself a one-piece swimsuit by stitching black stockings into a boy’s costume, showing her legs above the knee.

  In the USA in 1907, she was arrested on a Boston beach and charged with public indecency when she attempted to swim in an adapted men’s swimsuit that showed her bare legs. The newspapers loved her and took up her cause and massive publicity followed.

  She originated water ballet, which is now called synchronised swimming, and toured theatres across Europe and the United States, starring in a spectacular aquatic act as the ‘Australian Mermaid and Diving Venus’.

  She then became a movie star. Her first Hollywood film in 1914 was Neptune’s Daughter and that was followed by Venus of the South Seas, Daughter of the Gods and The Art of Diving.

  Kellerman did all her own stunts, including diving 30 metres into the sea and 18 metres into a pool full of crocodiles. A film of her life, Million Dollar Mermaid, made in 1952, starred swimmer turned movie star Esther Williams.

  A teetotaller and a lifelong vegetarian, Kellerman promoted swimming for health and fitness and wrote several bestsellers, including Physical Beauty and How to Keep It. She toured America and Germany lecturing on health and fitness and ran a health-food store for many years at Long Beach in California.

  Kellerman’s childhood disease is often wrongly said to have been polio. Although she never suffered from polio, she did meet polio victim President Roosevelt and designed some exercises for him. During World War II she lived in Queensland where she assisted polio pioneer Sister Elizabeth Kenny. She also entertained US and Australian troops and worked for the Australian Red Cross.

  In 1912, Kellerman married James Sullivan, who had managed her career from 1907 when her father became ill. They were together for over sixty years and, from 1970, they lived on the Gold Coast at Southport where Annette continued to swim daily until her death in 1974 at the age of eighty-nine.

  After her arrest in Boston in 1907 and the resultant publicity, Harvard University Professor Dudley Sargent, who had been researching the female body for twenty-five years, measured every inch of her body and declared that she was the first woman in over 10,000 he had studied who had the same measurements as the Venus de Milo. He presented her on stage at Harvard in her bathing suit in front of his young male students and declared she was ‘the perfect woman’.

  Annette Kellerman modestly added, ‘Maybe from the neck down.’

  JH

  ROY RENE

  Mo

  Roy Rene was a fascinating character. He was the toast of Australia, as far as comedy went, for the first half of the twentieth century, with his irreverent and uniquely Australian style of humour.

  His professional name was Roy Rene and his real name was Harry Van Der Sluice. His stage name was Mo and his radio persona was Mo McCackie.

  Mo was born in 1891, one of seven children of a Dutch cigar maker and an English mother, both Jews, who had migrated to Adelaide in the 1880s. Mo began his career singing at Adelaide Markets as a boy aged ten and later tried his luck in Melbourne before moving to Sydney and switching to comedy.

  Mo’s comedy persona was an odd blend of a Jewish caricature, a black and white face-painted clown and a sleazy slapstick Aussie larrikin. His brand of humour was delightfully Australian and very politically incorrect by today’s standards.

  His comedy ranged from lewd slapstick to quite surreal material, which was ahead of its time. One of my favourite bits of Mo’s dark humour occurs in a skit about a visit to the psychiatrist. When the doctor suggests that Mo needs a hobby, he replies, ‘I have a hobby, Doc, I keep goldfish.’

  ‘Ah, that’s nice, where do you keep them?’ asks the doctor.

  ‘In the fridge,’ Mo replies.

  ‘Good heavens,’ says the shocked psychiatrist, ‘they’ll die in there!’

  ‘Blimey, Doc,’ says Mo with a pitying look and eyebrows raised, ‘it’s only a hobby!’

  When the doctor gives Mo a Rorschach inkblot test and gets lewd responses to every inkblot, he diagnoses sexual obsession as Mo’s problem.

  ‘Blimey, Doc,’ Mo complains, ‘you’
re the one with all the dirty pictures!’

  Although Mo received high praise as a comic genius from famous visitors such as Dame Sybil Thorndike, Jack Benny and Fred Allen, he was never tempted to try his luck overseas. He said his humour was too Australian to work in the USA and often remarked, ‘Look what they did to Les Darcy and Phar Lap!’

  In his private life, he was a loving but strict father and quite narrow-minded, according to his wife. As far as his artistic temperament was concerned, he was, like many talented people, wary of other talented performers, dismissive of their talents and almost paranoid at times about being the top act on the show.

  He fell out with his long-time stage partner Nat ‘Stiffy’ Phillips twice, once in 1925 and finally again after a brief reunion in 1928, and was renowned for being disparaging about other performers and quite ruthless and unfriendly at times, even to old friends.

  The egos of many performers are part and parcel of their talent and often Mo’s insecurity made him quite unconsciously funny.

  When the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler was receiving rave reviews in Australia, with sellout crowds and standing ovations, someone remarked to Mo what a great act Adler was.

  ‘I don’t see it at all,’ replied the king of Australian variety dismissively, ‘take away his mouth organ and he wouldn’t be worth a zac.’

  JH

  BEA MILES

  Delightfully Eccentric and Proudly Australian

  Bohemian rebel Beatrice Miles was born on 17 September 1902 at Ashfield, Sydney, third surviving child of the five children of John Miles, a Sydney-born accountant, and his wife, Maria Louisa. The family moved to fashionable St Ives and Bea was educated at the famous private girls’ school, Abbotsleigh.

  An inheritance from her paternal grandmother allowed Bea to escape the violent scenes that characterised her relationship with her father. She enrolled in arts at the University of Sydney, but discontinued her studies after a year ‘because they did not teach enough Australian stuff’. Soon after, she contracted encephalitis. Conflicts with her father continued, over her lifestyle and sexual ‘freedom’. In 1923, he had her committed to the Hospital for the Insane, Gladesville, where she remained until publicity in Smith’s Weekly led to her release in 1925.