The Ingenue

Mary Pickford - an ingenue of  silent films

What is an Ingenue?
An ingenue is an innocent; a guileless girl-woman who has charm, physical appeal and general niceness but is unsullied by too much worldly knowledge. Ingenues have been a mainstay character-type in film, literature and theatre for as long as these mediums have been around. They represent the eternal ideal of the virtue in women; Eve before the apple incident.

The Ingenue in Films

In the silent film era ingenues were particularly prevalent. Ham-fisted story-lines tended to revolve around sweet, artless young women who were often being threatened by the corrupting influence and/or physical violence of a villain - they were variations on the old cliched theme of the innocent girl tied to the railroad track by the ghastly evildoer and is rescued, with seconds to spare, by the gallant actions of the male lead.

Of course as audiences became more sophisticated, so did plots and subtler versions of the ingenue appeared. Ingenues became involved in complex plots involving a range of dramas and situations, from gangsters to spy thrillers. Screwball comedies of the 1930s featured feisty, wisecracking ingenues with bags of sex-appeal yet who seemed strangely immune to sexual innuendo.

Batik Art

Batik is an Indonesian word and refers to a particular method of dying cloth known as 'resist dying', whereby part of the cloth is deliberately prevented from absorbing colour dyes. Instead of a uniformly patterned colour effect, Batik cloth is a vibrant mix of hues, with varying colour intensity on different parts of the cloth.

Wax or paste is commonly used in traditional resist dying - this is applied to various parts of the cloth before the whole is dipped in dye. As the wax is usually applied by hand and the process not exact, a more random colour pattern is achieved, with indistinct, rather than precise borders around the patches of colour. It's a process that has been used in Asia, Egypt and Africa since ancient times.

1950s Melbourne

Flinders St Station and trams  in the 1950s- Melbourne icons

Stability and Sedation

When glamorous US film star Ava Gardner visited Melbourne in 1959 to film Neville Shute's nuclear-disaster novel On the Beach, she was allegedly unimpressed by our isolated corner of the world and famously described it as "the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world". US evangelist Billy Graham however, while visiting in 1950, had called it "the most moral city in the world". Perhaps in between those two descriptions, almost a decade apart, lay an unavoidable correlation...were we morally upright but dreadfully dull? More recently, journalist Neil Jillet has claimed Gardner  never made the remark at all but rather it was a colourful invention of his own, yet this scarcely seems to matter, as the remark, now etched into Melbourne folklore, had touched a raw nerve.

A Shallow History of the Face Lift

The Eternal Quest for Youth and Beauty
As we grow older, we (some of us) become susceptible to the lure of the fountain of youth, preferring to believe in the promise of plastic surgery, rather  than accept the realities of aging. Thus notions of "growing old gracefully" are vanquished to the outer reaches, while we do a cost/benefit analysis of  plastic surgery.

Although we do live in a particularly shallow media-driven culture where youthful image rules, the desire to extend the appearance of youth is nothing new. Even the ancient world dabbled in plastic surgery and in modern terms, surgeons have been performing face-lifts since the beginning of the 20th century.

It began with the discovery that a simple incision in front of the ear,  the removal of a slice of skin and stitching the whole thing back together as discreetly as possible could make the face tauter and thus more youthful. This 'mini-lift' was popular in Paris among film stars and the vain and well-to-do.

Foy and Gibson Department Store

Pony rides on Foys rooftop. Photo courtesy of the Bulpit family

Old Melbourne - Foys Rooftop Carnival

Christmas at Foys was a big event. Source

Foy and Gibson, commonly called Foys by its patrons, was an iconic department store in Bourke St Melbourne, up until 1967, when the company sold out to David Jones. Foys had been built on the site of the old Orient Hotel, which was knocked down to build the massive store.

Foys was famous for its toy department and the annual Christmas rooftop carnival - many a Mebournian child was taken into the store to meet Father Christmas and receive a wrapped present. The logistics of hosting a carnival, complete with ponies, merry-go-rounds etc on a rooftop in a busy city location must have been daunting.  On the Museum Victoria website, English immigrant John Woods, whose photograph appears at right, and who remembers the rooftop carnival well, recalls:

I also remember an annual rooftop carnival on the Foys building. There was a ferris wheel which virtually hung over the edge of the building and could be seen from the street below. It was an exciting ride because it felt as if you were falling from the top of the building into Bourke street.~ Museum Victoria

Even a train ride. Photo courtesy of the Bulpit family.

Fun in the sky. Merry go round on Foys rooftop. Photo courtesy of the Bulpit family

Foys in Collingwood
In addition to the Bourke store, Foys occupied a large complex of buildings, designed by architect William Pitt, in Collingwood, incorporating Oxford Street, Cambridge Street, Stanley Street, Peel Street, Little Oxford Street and  Wellington Street.

Foy and Gibson, resplendent at night  on the corner of Swanstonand  Bourke St. Melbourne Source: State Library

At its height, the dominating factory complex contained "two miles of mills", employed around 2000 people and made most of the supplies that filled the Foy stores. The Foy and Gibson factory complex and retail stores in Smith Street, were an integral part of the area until most of the retail buildings were pulled down in the late 60s. Parts of the factory complex architecture survives however and are now  on the Heritage Victoria Register.

Postcard of Smith St Collingwood. Image from the State Library, Shirley Jones Collection

Mark Foy and William Gibson
The creator of this commercial empire was draper, Mark Foy, who, lured by the gold rush, emigrated from Ireland to Victoria in 1858. After knocking around the gold fields for a few years, he must have decided there was more fortune to be had in supply than extraction and he opened a drapers store in Smith Street Collingwood in 1870. It was a canny move, as by the end of the decade the drapers store had grown to occupy six shops.

After successfully building up the business, Mark Foy decided to retire and travel and passed on the business to his son Francis and a new partner, William Gibson, who came from a family of clothier manufacturers in Edinburgh and had arrived in Australia in 1882 - thus Foy and Gibson. Unfortunately, Mark Foy died on his travels, in San Francisco in 1884, however, after his departure from the firm, Foys continued to go from strength to strength under the guidance of William Gibson and Foys stores sprung up inner city Prahan and in three States - Perth, Adelaide and Queensland. The huge Bourke street store was built in the 1930s.

The Skipping Girl

Sources:  
Collingwood Historical Society.
Museum Victoria

Vintage-Style Christmas Ornaments

Retro-futurist robot reindeer

Some of my very earliest memories are of Christmas decorations, which may seem a tad odd but it's probably because Christmas is such an exciting time of the year for young children. Certainly it was for me.

I can, for example, remember being held on my father's shoulders to see the deep red and green concertina paper decorations in the corner of the ceiling in our living room, although I must have only been about two at the time. For some reason that one really sticks out in my mind - that and a set of felt-covered, rotund Father Christmas figures, each one holding a musical instrument. I wonder what happened to those?

Drive-in Movies

One of the few remaining (and rundown) drive-ins in Victoria, Australia

Dream Screen in the Dark
At the peak of their popularity, in the 1950s/60s and even 70s, drive-in movie theatres could be found dotted all over the place - come nightfall, thousands of people would slip into a parking space in front of the giant open air screen, roll down their windows and hook up to the theatre sound system - each car a personal viewing capsule.

1966

It Makes Cents!
1966 was a big year for Australia - for one thing, it was the year our currency changed from pounds, shillings and pence to the decimal system. The changeover at the Royal Mint in London was given the title "operation fastbuck"  - everything had to be ready by the 14th of February and new coins dispatched Australia-wide to the banks. At first there was public resistance to the change and a transitional period of dual currency but the government kindly provided the population with a catchy little jingle to help us along...

Classic Motels

An icon of the 20th century...the American Motel. Source

Vintage motel postcard, Tucumcari, New Mexico

America invented the motel and with it a national cultural icon. The word 'motel' was meant to denote a motorist's hotel and they were, in large part, a response to the exponential expansion of the automobile in US society; as road trips were becoming more and more popular,  the weary travellers needed convenient places to stay.

It was an innovative form of accommodation where travellers could conveniently park their cars just outside the door to their room and it wasn't long before motel chains began to spring up everywhere, some of them richly quirky, .such as the tee-pee-shaped rooms of the Wigwam motel on Route 66, where the sign apparently wittily read: When they suggested we stay at the Wigwam motel, I had my reservations.

Koala Swapcard

An Iconic Swapcard

Koala swapcard

Trading pictorial swapcards was a very popular activity among primary school children in Australia the 1960s, particularly for girls. In fact it was a pastime almost exclusively enjoyed by girls. Although boys may have trading football cards, the pretty picture cards were girls territory.

Single cards with plain backs could be purchased for 2 or 3 cents at the Newsagency but often the cards in circulation would have players marks on the underside, having at some point been commandeered from a deck.

Every recess, the swapcard girls would form a concentrated huddle in the playground and flip through their card stack - some girls had piles three or four inches thick, which they sometimes kept in purpose designed boxes or more rarely, in albums.

Deciding whether or not to swap was a serious business and of course, some cards were more desirable than others. Horses were very high on the list followed by cats, puppies and other cute furry animals. There were literally hundreds of designs in circulation - animals, people, places, toys, novelty pics etc.

The mother and baby koala card featured here, from a mid-century deck, was one of the desirables and widely traded on the swap card circuit in the 60s. It's significant in that it was one of the few designs that was uniquely Australian and likely to stir a nostalgic ripple in the memory of  anyone who was into swapcards in the 60s.  The koala card is still floating around on ebay and various places - selling for around $3.

The Grey Gardens Cult

The Bizarre Beales

Grey Gardens on DVD

Take a pair of financially strapped, mother and daughter socialites...aunt and cousin to the Bouviers (Jackie O), a ramshackle East Hampton country house, some highly eccentric behaviour and you have the subject of a much discussed 1976 documentary called  Grey Gardens. Since its airing three decades ago the bizarre Beales, both called 'Edie' -Big and Little,  assumed a kind of cult status and though they are now dead, they still have their fans. The story of the two Edies eventually spawned an HBO film,  a Broaday musical and various Grey Gardens fanclubs.

Articles in the early 70s and the low budget, Mayles Bros. documentary had incited much curiosity.   For one thing, viewers wanted to know how a family with such wealthy connections could be living in such extraordinary squalor? Yet it was perhaps, the very juxtaposition of this squalor with the still retained but badly peeling patina of former glamour and wealth that was so oddly compelling....like looking at a chipped Ming vase lying abandoned on a junk heap.

Who is Bob Hope?

For those who don't know - this is Bob Hope

A couple of years ago I was in the audience at a Judith Lucy (an Australian comedian) gig. In her cynically witty way, Lucy, as per usual, was railing against the vagaries of aging and the great exponential roll of time. To prove a point she zeroed in on a couple of youthful audience members - primary school teachers who were in their early 20s...

"Who's Bob Hope? she asked, with a forceful lunge toward the front row seating where the teachers sat twitching expectantly. "Was he a politician?" said one of the teachers, in a loud but not entirely confident voice. "A scientist!" said another, as if it were a revelation.

Although the audience shrieked with laughter, my first response was one of profound and disturbing shock...how could anyone not know who Bob Hope was? I mean Bob Hope! The man was positively an icon, whose presence was ubiquitous for a large part of the last century. Hadn't they seen any On the Road movies? It was I suppose, my first really painful realization of the great and inevitable divide between a shrinking older world and a new rising one, to whom vast chunks of 20th century culture mean little.

The Eternity Man

2000 Olympics fireworks display over Sydney Harbour

 When the evocative word 'eternity' lit up the Sydney skyline during the harbour fireworks display at the close of the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympics,  not everyone realised the word was a homage to a long deceased Sydney resident and local legend, Arthur Stace - a down and out, non-conformist, hard drinking WWI veteran. However while the man himself may have been humble, he possessed one grand concept that he clung to with an obsessive grip - eternity.

Niceness

Too nice

Sugar and Spice and all Things Really Nice
Niceness is  a pretty concept but it has its critics. On the one hand it seems straightforward. What could be wrong with 'niceness' and what it represents? - congeniality, manners, consideration, cleanliness. All admirable qualities.

Yet,  niceness has its dark undertones. Over the last few decades the word has suffered a considerable PR problem, to the point where in some quarters, to be referred to as nice is a downright insult. In a cynical world, niceness is often regarded with suspicion.