That Summer at Boomerang

by Phil Jarratt

  A week later Ford found Coogee Beach a friendlier proposition on a warm and sunny New Year’s Day:

  If there were any ordinances prohibiting men and women romping in their bathing-costumes upon the sands, they were happily violated a thousand times over. Old folk became young again; the ocean a fountain of youth, into which everyone dipped … No signboards warned the masses that they were suspected of committing improprieties; therefore improprieties seemed not to enter the heads of the happy throngs.

  Ford was eventually able to laugh off his encounter with the law at Manly, but he remained seriously affronted by the idea of such an infringement of personal liberties, and would warn acquaintances about Australian barbarism for the rest of his life. When they were reunited over dinner at McIntosh’s elegant Park Street apartment early in the New Year, Mac and Percy Hunter found the story hilarious. An hour after the telling, Mac was still splitting his sides about it, shaking with mirth so much that he spilled his ale as he explained the joke to late arrivals.

  At this small, intimate dinner Ford again found himself seated next to Mac adjacent to the head of the table. They’d barely begun their soup when Mac finally decided to cut to the chase. For almost a month now, he had been alluding to his plans for an entertainment revolution in Sydney without offering any detail. In fact, Ford had put the whole thing out of his mind, finding that he had many more interests in common with Percy Hunter. But now the moment of revelation had arrived. Mac leaned over conspiratorially, acquainting Ford a little too closely with a bar room aroma of beer, whisky and cigars. ‘Ford, do you want to make a lot of money?’

  ‘Mac, I already have a lot of money.’

  Mac guffawed, causing the rest of the table to look up from their conversations, but then he resumed the huddle. ‘Point taken, old boy. But listen, this city is to welcome the American Great White Fleet in a matter of a few months, and regular visits are anticipated, along with a large increase in the volume of trans-Pacific passenger traffic, as you well know. While our cities become bigger, the world is becoming a smaller place, and Australia will soon begin to see a huge increase in visitors. Not only that, but Australians are earning more and spending more, and there are a great many people, like myself, who wish to be offered the same entertainments here that can be found in the other great world capitals. This is why I have taken a lease on a large tract of land adjacent to the city, and will soon build a boxing stadium big enough to hold a crowd worthy of a world-title fight. And I have invited the great Tommy Burns to put his world title on the line here in our great city. Would you like to be a part of this bold adventure?’

  Ford could feel a sting in the air, and it wasn’t just the harbour breeze wafting in from the terrace. He responded: ‘Sir, if you are looking for investors, I’m not sure that …’

  Mac cut across him with a steady but forceful tone: ‘I don’t need your money either, Ford, I need your soul.’ He went on to describe a grandiose plan to lure sports fans from around the world to watch the brave Australian challenger, Bill ‘Boshter’ Squires, take the title away from the Canadian. Ford’s role would be to put out the clarion call across the Pacific, using his undoubted talents as a booster and his myriad connections in the world of journalism and publishing to promote the event and the destination.

  McIntosh and Hunter had opened doors all over Sydney for Ford, and although he did not wish to feel as if he had sold his soul, he had no problem with repaying the favours by extolling the general virtues of Sydney and the specific virtues of Mac’s big event to every noted pressman he knew, and he knew a lot. Even so, he was having difficulties seeing a way to get people enthusiastic about a long sea voyage to watch the heavyweight champion of the world knock down an easybeat shearer from Narrabri he had already knocked down twice before. Moreover, since his introduction to Percy Hunter, he had begun to formulate a couple of exciting ideas in which the two could better employ their journalistic and publicity skills and enthusiasm.

  Hunter, too, was excited by Ford’s energy and vision, later writing:

  I remember particularly a young man who spent a few days in Sydney in 1907, a restless, energetic, imaginative magazine writer from New York. I took to him the moment he told me he travelled for nine months in the year, and for the other three dictated magazine articles to a stenographer. He not only had the travel lust, but he had the love of places. Since that day he has spread the fame and beauty and seductive call of Sydney far and wide.

  The idea that most involved Hunter was the establishment of an association or club that loosely bound together the great capitals of the Pacific basin—Sydney and Honolulu at the forefront—in a loose confederation of initiatives to grow the economic potential of the region, particularly through tourism. Ford even had a name for it: Hands across the Pacific.

  The second idea was more closely related to surfing. Ford had noted the birth over the summer of life-saving clubs at several of Sydney’s most popular beaches, and despite his near arrest for the indecent exposure of his ankles and knees, he had found an emerging bathing bureaucracy that he felt Waikiki would do well to emulate. The captains of industry and the leading lights of Sydney society were gathering under the same banner to control the new sports of surf bathing and surf-riding, to create healthy competition in them and to provide a safe haven for their development. In Waikiki since the new century began there had been tremendous growth in all the wave-riding sports, including a renaissance of traditional outrigger canoeing, but there was no organisational structure and no support from either city or territory governments. Ford felt that an organisation similar to the Surf Bathing Association would flourish in Waikiki.

  As it happened, Percy Hunter had recently been joined at the Tourist Bureau by Charles D. Paterson, who had founded the State Railways Tourism Office in 1904. With that organisation now being brought under the wing of Hunter’s Tourist Bureau, Paterson had become his second-in-command. Paterson had grown up body-shooting the waves at isolated South West Rocks on the Mid-North Coast, and was now founding president of the North Steyne Surf Club at Manly, and one of the key men in establishing the Surf Bathing Association of New South Wales. Ford took him to lunch a couple of times and picked his brains.

  When Ford left Sydney at the end of January, he told McIntosh he would look at ways and means of promoting his prize fight and would be back in touch by letter. He told Hunter and Paterson he would get in touch by telegram the moment his ship docked.

  Ford cruised his way home via New Zealand and the New Hebrides, where he was shocked to find on the docks hundreds of Kanaka labourers who had been forcibly taken from their villages to work on the Queensland cane fields and were now, as part of the White Australia policy, being dumped back on their doorstep to try to restart their lives. Ford was in many ways an elitist, and he had grown up in a community where people openly lamented the quite recent outlawing of slavery, but he had travelled widely and seen enough of human bondage to believe it was an abomination. He made a note to write to Hunter and enquire what the Hands across the Pacific club might do to help.

  The view towards Diamond Head from the Seaside Hotel, 1908. Photo courtesy Outrigger Canoe Club.

  He docked in Honolulu on 2 March 1908, rented a grass bungalow at the Seaside Hotel and set about his work with a real sense of purpose. Since the completion of the Moana Hotel on the beachfront and the increasing number of cruise ships docking in the harbour each week, Waikiki was fast becoming a popular holiday destination, with visitor numbers doubling and even trebling with each new season. But Ford only had last season and this to compare, and the change he saw was phenomenal. There were vastly more surfboard riders on the waves now, and he put this down to the popular images of surf-riding that were becoming commonplace, such as Alfred Gurrey’s photographs and the cinematographic ‘actualities’ produced by the Pathé company. During Ford’s travels, Jack London’s surf-riding article had appeared in A Woman’s Home Compa
nion, America’s second-biggest selling magazine. (In a stack of mail awaiting him in Honolulu, Ford found a letter from a New York publishing friend outlining the impact that London’s piece had made on the Matson Lines, almost doubling their Hawaiian winter bookings from the previous year and convincing them to take back-page advertising in the magazine for the next twelve months.)

  Ford’s idea was to borrow from the Australian surf life-saving model and found a beachfront club at Waikiki that would nurture talent in the surf-riding sports, keep the participants safe, promote the island paradise that gave them root and bring in tourist dollars for the new Territory. If he also saw an income being derived from the venture, then he kept such thoughts to himself, and, as he had told McIntosh in Australia, he had no real need to line his own pockets.

  Ford initially approached William T. ‘Big Bill’ Rawlins, lawyer, businessman, Worshipful Master Elect of the Honolulu Freemason’s Lodge and surf-bathing enthusiast, for assistance in getting his project going, but Rawlins promised only moral support and suggested he talk to Hart Wood, head of the new Hawaii Promotion Committee. Wood liked the idea of a beach club whose charter was to promote traditional Hawaiian surf sports, particularly in view of the fact that President Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet would soon be calling, and thousands of navy men would be looking for water-sports entertainment. Wood connected Ford with A.L.C. ‘Jack’ Atkinson, secretary of the Territory, and Atkinson connected him with Bruce Cartwright, trustee of the Queen Emma Estate, which controlled the beachfront land between the Moana and Seaside hotels. The consummate networker, Ford had a lease on a property for his club and widespread support across the haole business community by the time he had wangled an invitation to address the Commercial Club in April. The terms of the lease were extraordinarily generous: 30 years at ten dollars a year for an acre and a half of beachfront in what was already the tourist hub of Waikiki. On 1 May 1908, the Outrigger Canoe and Surfboard Club was formally established with a membership of 86 of Honolulu’s leading citizens (although few of them would become active members) plus fifteen juniors. Ford was elected president.

  If Ford needed another ally that spring, he soon found it in the extraordinary Elias Burton Holmes. Although he was a year younger than Ford, Burton Holmes seemed to have already crammed several lifetimes into his fewer than 40 years. Born in Chicago in 1870, Burton Holmes was acknowledged as the world’s leading travel documentarian, punctuating his travel adventures with wildly successful lecture series that played the great concert halls of New York, London and all over Europe. The secret of Burton Holmes’s success with audiences was his knack for transporting them to exotic places, as if they had been there with him. Initially, he achieved this through his creation of ‘magic lantern’ slide shows, using painstakingly hand-coloured photographic glass slides, but by the 1900s he was also adapting the new technology of cinematographic actualities into his shows. And they were shows rather than lectures, for Burton Holmes was a showman through and through, a larger-than-life figure with an elegantly waxed moustache and a goatee beard, given to wearing top hats and capes.

  Ford had adored the idea of Burton Holmes since first setting eyes on him in New York almost a decade earlier. They had briefly become acquaintances before Burton Holmes went off on another adventure, and Ford began his own travels, but the two men had subsequently lost contact. Imagine Ford’s surprise, then, to discover within a few days of his return that Burton Holmes was booked to give a series of travelogues at the Bishop Hall the following week, and would be staying at the Seaside Hotel.

  Burton Holmes was an easy conscript to Ford’s cause. Although his first attempts at surfing were more promising than Jack London’s had been, he was no natural. But it mattered little to him. He was a collector of cultural experience, and the rebirth of an ancient tradition in the new century struck him as a wonderful subject for a travelogue. The idea of founding a club to perpetuate the renaissance of the culture also resonated with him.

  Working around Burton Holmes’s lecture schedule, the two men photographed beach lanais and drew sketches of a clubhouse and surfboard-storage facility on the beach, in preparation for a public presentation. Burton Holmes was at his side when Ford addressed the Commercial Club of Honolulu in the late spring, offering an enthusiastic endorsement of his friend’s vision.

  By early summer, however, Burton Holmes had returned to the mainland, bound for a European lecture tour, and Ford suddenly found himself standing alone with the task of building the club ahead of him. It was Big Bill Rawlins who came to his rescue: ‘The Kaimuki Zoo out by Koko Head is about to close and there’re some grass houses there in good shape that could stand the move. I’m sure you’ll get a good price.’

  Initially appalled—his own vision of a clubhouse being much grander—Ford soon adapted Rawlins’s view. A grass shack clubhouse on the beach, not permanent but immediate; he could live with that, and it would show a certain empathy for the island culture while claiming the space in time for the arrival of the Great White Fleet. ‘It’s like a dog pissing on the grass to stake out his territory,’ Bill Rawlins said, blowing a cloud of cigar smoke into the air. ‘Go piss on Queen Emma’s estate, Hume, before someone else does.’

  While the Outrigger Canoe Club (much to Ford’s annoyance, the ‘surfboard’ part of the name was usually left off) was taking shape, Ford received a telegram from Hugh McIntosh in Sydney informing him that his world-title fight, predictably won by Tommy Burns, had been a sellout and that he was using the proceeds to fund an even bigger idea.

  Like many entrepreneurs in the Pacific basin, McIntosh had gambled hugely on Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, taking temporary leases on dance halls, theatres, pubs, even motor launches—anything that might wrest a few Yankee dollars from the pockets of the 16,000 crewmen from the sixteen warships and five support vessels that made up the fleet whose main purpose was to show the world the fearsome reality of the American president’s ‘Big Stick’ diplomacy initiative. McIntosh left no stone unturned in providing entertainment over the week-long visit, but his biggest gamble was the construction of the massive (about 100 metres by 150) open-roof Sydney Stadium on the edge of the city at Rushcutters Bay specifically for the title fight that would be the major event of the week. Even though it was meant to be a temporary construction, whipped up in six weeks by timber merchant George Hudson, it cost 2600 pounds. It was the largest boxing arena in the world, with capacity for 20,000 people on its tiered bleacher seating. McIntosh imagined it filled with screaming sailors when Tommy Burns, whose appearance fee was another 4000 pounds, went around in defence of his title.

  But while the sailors threw money at most of McIntosh’s enterprises—his dances at Paddington Town Hall were a huge hit with ‘Australian beauties welcome’, as the advertisements proclaimed—they stayed away from the fight in droves. ‘In a sea of straw hats there wasn’t a single doughboy,’ he said later. Not that it mattered. Sydney sports fans packed the stadium to capacity with hundreds turned away. Gate receipts were 13,400 pounds, the biggest boxing gate in history by 200 pounds. The fight game had been in the doldrums in Australia for years, but through sheer audacity, Hugh McIntosh had turned it around with one event.

  McIntosh proudly informed Ford that the press men had now dubbed him ‘Huge Deal McIntosh’. Ford read on through the long telegram, his interest in Huge Deal’s mad plans growing with every sentence. This was something he could sell. This truly was a huge deal. By the end of the week he had fired off cables to Burton Holmes, Jack London and Baltimore’s H.L. ‘Hank’ Mencken apprising them of McIntosh’s no-strings offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to Sydney, Australia to report on the greatest heavyweight-title fight the world had ever seen—the champion, Tommy Burns of Canada, versus the African American challenger, Jack Johnson.

  Looking back over more than a century, it is perhaps difficult to understand how McIntosh thought he could make a fortune by putting two foreigners in the ri
ng in parochial Sydney, world title or no world title. The answer was the race card. No black fighter was eligible to contest a world title in America, and the flamboyant Johnson had chased Burns all over Europe trying to get a title shot. McIntosh opened his cheque book and made it happen in Sydney, where The Bulletin magazine had just summed up the national sentiment by changing its masthead slogan from ‘Australia for Australians’ to ‘Australia for the White Man’.

  Smiling Jack Johnson, 1909. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

  Johnson had been to Australia before, in 1907, when he knocked out two aspirants to the Australian heavyweight title and scandalised Sydney by making forays into nightclubs with well-known white prostitutes on his arm, and conducting an alleged affair with socialite Lola Toy, an adventure that landed him in court. This time, with his new wife in tow, Johnson was more subdued. While Burns trained at the sumptuous Mark Foy’s Hydro Majestic Hotel in the Blue Mountains, Johnson made his base at the less salubrious Sir Joseph Banks Hotel at Botany Bay. Burns, who had no real interest in fighting the black man, had tried to price himself out of the market, but McIntosh had agreed to his exorbitant 6000-dollar fee. Johnson was on a thousand dollars regardless of the result.

  Just before Christmas 1908, the cream of the world’s sporting media, led by America’s best-read journalists, Jack London and H.L. Mencken, began arriving in Sydney, eager to report this historic, race-charged stoush in a strange land, 65 years ahead of Muhammad Ali’s ‘thriller in Manila’.

  On a steamy Boxing Day in Rushcutters Bay, more than 20,000 people sweltered in the topless arena while another 20,000 disgruntled punters waited on the paddock outside for the result. (In a deal McIntosh had struck with the influential Randwick Turf Club, the fight had to begin at eleven in the morning, so that the punters could make it the short distance to Randwick in time to lay their bets for the first race.) Referee McIntosh—the fighters had not been able to agree on anyone else—gave the nod to the ringside coppers to stop the bout in the fourteenth, when a bruised and bloodied Burns could simply take no more. ‘The fight, if a fight it must be called,’ wrote Jack London, ‘was like that between a pigmy and a colossus.’