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The Tusitala of ‘Villa Vailima’: RLS in Samoa
⌂ 1890s map of the Samoan Islands
Barely four kilometres south of Apia Town, just off the Cross Island Road, is Samoa’s finest residential building, Villa Vailima (1891), the home away from the (Northern) cold built by Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson (see FN below).
⌂ RLS ‘Treasure Island’ Samoan stamp
Anyone with a passing acquaintance of mainstream Western literature will have some familiarity with Stevenson’s work. Author of a host of illustrious juvenile adventure classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae✲, and one Gothic novella, Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, offering deep psychological insights into the human mind.
Stevenson’s voluntary exile from Britain in search of a climate less injurious to his fragile health led him to the Pacific. After sailing around the islands on an extended ‘odyssey’ (Hawaii, Gilbert and Ellice Islands, New Caledonia, Marshall Islands, etc), Stevenson (accompanied by his American wife) settled on Samoa as a hoped-for antidote to his chronic bronchial condition✥.
RLS in local politics When Stevenson set anchor in Samoa the islands were in the midst of a civil war over succession to the Samoan throne. Behind the stand-off between rival chieftains was a three-way struggle for control between the colonial powers, Germany, the US and Britain, each of which had despatched warships to the Samoan islands to protect it’s commercial interests. While building the Vailima home RLS embroiled himself in the political conflict, taking the islanders’ side against the colonialists…so much so that he became a sort of political advisor to the indigenous factions [‘History of Samoa’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
By the conclusion of a second civil war in 1899, the colonial powers under a Tripartite Convention divided up the islands between them – Germany retained the western islands of Upolu and Savai’i, and the US got American Samoa (Britain did a trade for the Northern Solomons) [ibid.]
The Stevenson family at the Vailima homestead ⥥
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Tusitala’s kudos Stevenson’s whole-hearted embrace of the Samoan people was reciprocated…though a palagi (white-skinned person) they afforded him a special status in Samoan society. The Samoans attributed the quality of mana (“heaven-sent” supernatural powers) to the writer. And the craft of his story-telling which he had mastered so expertly in his novels led Samoans to bestow on him the title of Tusitala, the “teller of tales” [‘Samoans Honor Adopted Son, The Teller of Tales’, (Lawrence Van Gelder], New York Times, 08-Dec-1994, www.nytimes.com]. Samoans however were nonplussed as to how RLS earned his living (being at a loss to comprehend how the activity of story-telling could amount to paid work!).
Centennary British banknote with images of RLS & Vailima ⥥
After RLS’s death of a stroke in December 1894 after decades of ill-health, his widow sold up and returned to California. Since then, Villa Vailima initially housed the German colonial administrators followed by the New Zealand ones. After decolonisation it became the residence of the Western Samoan head of state. Finally, restored to its impecable state, it was transformed into its present incarnation as the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum on the anniversary of the novelist’s death.
Recreating RLS’ treasured island haven A visit to Villa Vailima today will discover a slendid, elegant mansion of a building. A tour will reveal the scope of the interior which includes five bedrooms, a large living room, a smoking room, a library/ study and a ballroom big enough to accommodate 100 dancers. In his time there Stevenson made several additions and extensions…I was informed by our guide that the east wing of the building was added later as separate living quarters for RLS’s mother-in-law who had come to live with them◙.
The walls of some of the Villa’s rooms were adorned with incongruous items, like the bow-and-arrow set in this bedroom ⥥
RSL’s study and the smoking room are probably the highlights of the tour for several reasons…on display in the former is a bookcase full of original translations of RL Stevenson works. Even more impressive, it contains the novelist ’s original, solid wood writing desk (on which he wrote his last four novels). The pièce de résistance for me though was in the downstairs smoking room – a double fireplace had been installed (and never used!) It seems that the Scot wanted the “feel-good” reassurance of having a quintessential feature of his former Northern hemisphere life – irrespective of how incongruously impractical it seemed (and how puzzling to Stevenson’s Samoan attendants!), located in the steamy tropical climes of the South Pacific. RL’s wife Fanny had her own familiar reminder of home at the Vailima house, she had the walls of her bedroom lined with polished Californian redwood [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett et al) (2003)].
⥥ The smoking room 
I was also intrigued by the contents of the spacious living room…what caught my eye immediately was this massive mega-safe in the middle of the room (too big I thought even for the XXL-proportioned Samoans to move!). The very large portrait of RLS (by Sargent?) next to it looked broodingly dark and foreboding. The guide recounted to us how Stevenson was brought into this room by his servants after he was fatally stricken out on the front lawns of the property.
Ascending Mt Vaea It is very fitting once you’ve toured the RLS residence and learnt some of his Samoan story to take in the final chapter by making the 472m trek up Mt Vaea to glimpse the “teller of tales’” final resting place. It’s a short but a very steep climb and can get very hazardous after heavy rain (I have first-hand experience of how slippery it can get having slid right off the quagmire of a track on the return descent!). When you reach the beautiful high plateau where Stevenson’s tomb is located you will appreciate just how irenic and tranquil the setting is. The great views of the island from the top are also well worth the effort of getting there.
Footnote on ‘Vailima’: There are two interpretations of the name’s etymology – in Samoan ‘vai’ means ‘water’ so Vailima is commonly rendered as “Five Waters”, however the suffix ‘lima’ can mean ‘hand’ or ‘arm’ (as well as the number ‘five), so an alternate (literal) explanation for Vailima is “water in the hand” [Theroux, J. (1981). ‘Some Misconceptions about RLS’. The Journal of Pacific History, 16(3), 164-166. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25168472]
PostScript: RLS in Sydney From his Samoa base Stevenson made several trips to Sydney, staying mainly at the city’s Union Club (Bent Street) and at the Oxford Club (Darlinghurst). On one visit he stopped over in Auckland where he met the former governor and premier of NZ, Sir George Grey. Stevenson occupied his time in Sydney by mainly working on various manuscripts of novels and stories (including The Wrecker, Ebb-Tide and In The South Seas)✪ [‘RLS Website’, (2018), www.robert-louis-stevenson.org].
⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝⇜⇝
✲ not to neglect the personal favourite “Boys Own” RLS book of my 11-year-old self, The Black Arrow ➳
✥ the choice of Samoa as home was desirable on pragmatic terms because it had a regular mail service (allowing RLS the professional author to connect with agents, editors and publishers). He was also attracted to the place because it was not too ‘civilised’ [Prof Richard Dury, ‘RLS Website’]
◙ the anecdote goes that Stevenson sent her off to Sydney for a few months and upon her return had the new wing built so he could put some (much sought-after) distance between them!
✪ these last two books plus The Wrong Box (1889) were co-written with his American stepson (S) Lloyd Osbourne
The ‘Aggie’, Apia’s Landmark Hotel and One Legendary Samoan Entrepreneurial Hotelier
An essential part of a tour of Independent Samoa’s main island, Upolu, is a trip to Aggie Grey’s…Samoa’s historic hotel in Beach Road on the western bank of the Vaisigano River. The place is a South Pacific institution, as was its legendary eponymous founder.
Aggie Grey’s Hotel (#77) ⍗
The ‘Aggie’ of Aggie Grey’s was born Agnes Genevieve Swann✲, the offspring of an English pharmacist from Lincolnshire and his Samoan wife, a local taupou (a ceremonial maiden). Business seemed to be in Miss Swann’s DNA – in her early twenties she opened her first club in Apia, the Cosmopolitan Club, and in 1933 started a Samoan private tourism company, Grey Investments (later called the Grey Investments Group).
No luck with ‘Kiwi’ spouses
The early death of Aggie’s first New Zealand husband left her without support and with four children to care for…the addictive gambling of her second husband squandered what money they had. In addition Aggie now had three more children and desperately needed to find a way to revive and consolidate her precarious financial situation.
With the advent of the Pacific War and American involvement, the resourceful and inventive Aggie eventually found the solution in 1942. She had earlier borrowed US$180 to purchase a colonial home which previously had been the “British Club”. As New Zealand’s prohibition laws were in force in Western Samoa⊡, Aggie started ‘Aggie Grey’s’ as a snack bar selling hamburgers and coffee to US servicemen on their tours of duty [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett, D Talbot & D Swaney) (4th Ed 2003)].
The Hotel, 2006 ⍐
The American GIs in the South Pacific had plenty of money to splash around on their R & R activities, but the prohibition on liquor was a hand-brake on Aggie’s capacity to grow her business. Aggie found a inventive method of circumventing the ban…although serving alcohol was illegal, Aggie got round it by dispensing “medical permit doses” of booze to the American servicemen [‘Aggie Grey: West Point Hotelier, Legend – Apia, Upolu, Samoa’, in The Samoans: A Global Family, Frederic Koehler Sutter, (1989)].
⍗ Aggie Grey: on the maiden Pan Am flight from Pago Pago (American Samoa) to Sydney International Airport, 1962 (photo: John Mulligan)
From a backwater-town bar to a tourist hub
Beyond the war, over the following years, Mrs Grey turned the Apia hotel from a modest “drinking club” to a 200-room international hotel (arguably vying with Suva’s Grand Pacific Hotel for the mantle of the South Pacific’s premier international hotel) [‘Memories of the incomparable Aggie Grey’, Samoa Observer, (Terry Dunleavy), 26-Apr-2016, www.samoaobserver.com].
An ‘aiga welcome
The key to this success can be found largely in Aggie’s management style – her warm interpersonal skills, authentic, convivial personality, and her innate “understanding of the human condition”. Through her personal example of showing hospitality she imbued “Aggie Grey’s” with an atmosphere of “laid back Samoan friendly fa’aaloalo” (‘respect), conveying to each guest a sense that they were ‘aiga (‘family’) [Dunleavy].
In the formative days the hotel thrived as a result of Aggie’s ability to network… forging business links with the world outside Samoa – with the management and crews of TEAL (forerunner of Air New Zealand), and in encouraging celebrity A-listers (especially from the US) to make Samoa and Abbie Grey’s a regular stopover on route to film assignments in French Polynesia [ibid.]. Accordingly, the likes of Hollywood stars Marlon Brando, Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Gary Cooper✥ et al would be regular AG guests. Aggie sought to capitalise on the celebrity aura by naming each of the hotel’s fales (rooms) and bungalows after visiting movie celebs.
The Marlon Brando fale (№ 93) at AGs ⍗
The hotel’s postwar success rested on a number of contributing factors. The arrival of trans-Pacific airlines (TEAL/Air NZ, Pan Am, QANTAS, then later Virgin’s Polynesian Blue) brought increasing numbers of tourists to replace the WWII servicemen. Aggie also had the right people behind her…a son with a good head for business, and a irreplaceable and devoted handiman, a “Mr Fixit” by the name of Fred Fairman, who Aggie could always rely on to keep the ‘wheels’ of the hotel running smoothly [ibid.; Sutter, loc.cit.].
Aggie Grey’s made it’s owner very wealthy…Aggie, a stalwart of the Samoan hospitality industry, continued at the hotel’s helm into her old age. In 1988 she died age 91, having long been one of the most respected members of the Apia business community.
Footnote: In December 2012 Cyclone Evan severely damaged Aggie Grey’s, closing it down for over three years. In August of the following year, management of the hotel complex, still under repairs, passed to the Sheraton’s hotel chain. Aggie Grey’s reopened in 2016, now operating under the name Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel & Bungalows. A second Aggie Grey’s complex in Upolu, Aggie Grey’s Lagoon Resort, was opened in 2005 off a coral reef in the west of the island (a joint venture between the Grey family, the governments of Samoa and New Zealand and Virgin Samoa). 🇼🇸
PostScript: Prototype for Bloody Mary?
One of the US servicemen who frequented Aggie Grey’s during the War was travel adventure author James A Michener. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific was later adapted into the hit Broadway musical South Pacific. One of it’s main characters, the loud and formidably forceful “Bloody Mary”, was widely thought to have been modelled on Aggie Grey, a comparison that didn’t endear itself to the Apia hotelier! [‘Lonely Planet’, op.cit.].
⍐ ‘Return to Paradise’ – Samoan film set & resources of ‘Aggie Grey’s’ 🇼🇸 (see below)
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✲ ‘Grey’ was the surname of Aggie’s second husband from New Zealand
⊡ New Zealand administered Western Samoa as it was called at this time, under a League of Nations mandate
✥ Cooper in fact made a movie in Samoa, Return to Paradise in 1953 (pretty stock standard South Seas adventure stuff), and of course Aggie came on board to contribute to the production …Aggie Grey’s hotel providing logistical support and a base for the project’s accommodation, and the indefatigable hotelier personally supervised the catering unit for the film [Dunleavy]
“Explorers’ Corner”: Where the Great Western Road Meets the Great Southern Road – Then and Now
Most motorists who regularly drive within a 10-15km radius of the centre of Sydney have found themselves at some time at the intersection of Parramatta and Liverpool Roads – not uncommonly in heavily banked-up peak traffic. In the pioneering days of the New South Wales colony, the routes of the two major roads played a seminal role in the exploration and discovery of new areas to the west, south and north of Sydney.
The first rough tracks crudely carved out of the wilderness by the colonists in 1788 pretty much follow the routes of Parramatta and Liverpool roads as they were later constructed✲. For many of the early explorers of NSW this intersection of the Great Western Road (to Parramatta, the Blue Mountains and beyond that the Central West and the continent’s vast interior) and the Great Southern Road (to Liverpool and the Southern Tablelands), was the jumping-off point for many exploratory treks into the colony’s hinterland.
The intersection at the junction of three inner west Sydney suburbs, Ashfield, Summer Hill and Haberfield, is thus the ideal place to commemorate those early heroic efforts of exploration, endurance and hardship, and in 1988 as part of Australia’s Bicentennary of European settlement, this is precisely what happened.
If you turn from Parramatta Road into Liverpool Road, immediately on your right, between a fast food chicken outlet and the corner, you will see a small, narrow tree-lined park (about 85-90m x 35m). The most intriguing association of the park is its name – Explorers Park✪.
The park comprises as its centrepiece a long arched trellis covered with the thick, verdant vines of a climbing plant, forming a tunnel effect. On the paved floor, along the length of the trellis, are plaques which celebrate those early 19th century Australian explorers. Starting with Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, who with the inestimable help of local aboriginal trackers from various clans and tribes, made the breakthrough discovery of a viable route across the Great Dividing Range, there are plaques with brief summaries of the achievements of all those who followed – the likes of Oxley, Mitchell, Sturt, the tragic Kennedy, Hume and Hovell (one half of which gave his name to the iconic Hume Highway that has its genesis at the intersection).
At the north end of the park, there’s a dome-shaped trellis which backs on to Parramatta Road. The trellis contains a white wall with a stencil pattern depicting images of the participants who made the pioneering achievements of exploration possible – the explorers themselves, their mode of transport (the camels) and their invaluable indigenous guides.
Long before the advent of the Bicenntenary triggered the construction of Explorers Park, the location was a busy thoroughfare for mounted travellers, horse and carts and livestock, especially after Liverpool Road was opened in 1821. One hundred years later exactly, with the age of the automobile established as the dominant and future mode of transport, this exact block of land was purchased by a motor engineer Frank Dale. Two years later in 1923, he built a motor service station (Dales Garage) on the site. Over the following decades ownership of the garage regularly changed hands (Major Motors, Western Service Station, etc.). Eventually the land was acquired by the DMR (Department of Main Roads) and the garage demolished to allow for the widening of the high-traffic intersection [‘Sydney’s fork in the road’, Inner West Courier, 19-Feb-2019 (Ann O’Connell, Ashfield Historical Society)].
Dales Garage (photo: Inner West Courier) ∇
Footnote: An early landmark pub for travellers Opposite the Explorers Park site, across Parramatta Road (in what is today Haberfield), there used to be another building at this important intersection…this was a hotel called Speed the Plough Inn (often abbreviated to ‘The Plough Inn’), one of Sydney’s iconic travellers’ pubs of the early colonial era. The Inn was built by a pioneering settler of Haberfield, David Ramsey in the late 1820s [‘The Dobroyde Estate’, (Ramsey Family History), http://belindacohen.tripod.com/ramsayfamilyhistory/dobroydestate.html].
▲ An early drawing of the hotel by George W Roberts (c.1845) (State Library of NSW)
Long gone, but in it’s day the Plough Inn went far beyond merely providing food, drink and shelter…boasting extensive stabling for livery and coach horses, as well as ample enclosures and water for livestock (the yard and adjoining paddocks were used for sheep and cattle sales) [Harvest of the Years – The Story of Burwood, 1794-1974, Eric Dunlop (1974 Burwood Municipal Council)]. The Plough Inn closed down in 1911 with the land becoming part of the Haberfield subdivision.
Speed the Plough Inn, Parramatta Road ∇
—————————————————————– ✲ as illustrated in Captain (later Governor) John Hunter’s An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea at the time
✪ Explorers Park is only metres from the larger Ashfield Park which features a statue of the popular children’s literature character Mary Poppins, commemorating the fact that the author of the Mary Poppins books, PL Travers, once lived in the suburb
✫✫ ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫
Bungan’s ‘Baronial’ Castle: 100 Years on the Headland
The northern coastline of suburban Sydney, with its abundance of picturesque beaches, is a magnet in summer for many visitors from far and near. One of the less frequented of the Northern Beaches, owing to its relative inaccessibility and lack of a rock pool✲, is Bungan Beach.
What drew me to Bungan this summer was not however the pristine waters of its uncrowded beach, but one particular unusual building standing out high up on Bungan Head…Bungan Castle, which this year celebrates 100 years since it was constructed.
Situated as one later observer noted “on a bold headland of the coast, about eighteen miles from Sydney” [1] (Newport, NSW), Bungan’s castle was built at the very pinnacle of a cliff-top by Gustav Adolph Wilhelm Albers, a German-born Australian artists’ agent. Today it is hemmed in and surrounded by a raft of modern, multi-million dollar mansions which share its unparalleled breathtaking views. But when Albers built “Bungan Castle” on what is now Bungan Head Road, the imposing high dwelling was surrounded only by bush and cleared scrub and completely neighbourless!✪
∆ [photo (ca.1928): National Library of Australia]
Albers in 1919 was considered something of a doyen of the Australian art community, he represented local artists like Sidney Long and JJ Hilder, and the castle (his abode at weekends and holidays❇) acted as a kind of 1920s arts hub, an unofficial Sydney artists’ colony. The leather-bound visitors’ book (still surviving) records the names of numerous artistic personalities of the early 20th century including the formidable and influential Norman Lindsay.
∆ [photo: NSW Archives & Records]
Aside from creating a skyline haven for practitioners of the art community, the eccentricity of Albers’ personal taste in decor is worthy of elaboration: he furnished Bungan Castle with an idiosyncratic and vast array of collectibles, a number of which the art connoisseur acquired on his regular jaunts overseas✤. The castle interior was inundated with a phenomenal “hotch-potch” of antiquated weaponry – including Medieval armour, Saracen helmets, Viking shields, sword and daggers including a Malay kris, battle-axes, muskets, flint-lock guns, Zulu rifles; convicts’ leg-irons and Aboriginal breast-plates.
∆ [photo: Fairfax Archives]
In addition to the assortment of objects of a martial nature, there were numerous other oddities and curios, such as a big bell previously located at Wisemans Ferry and used to signal the carrying out of convict executions in colonial times; a human skull mounted above the hall door (washed up on Bungan Beach below the castle); a sea chest; a variety of ships’ lanterns; “tom-toms” (drums) and various items of taxidermy [2].
This home is a castle – a “Half-Monty” of a castle
From the road below, staring up at the tree-lined Bungan Castle, it does bear the countenance of something from a pre-modern time and not out of place in a rural British landscape. Constructed of rough-hewn stone (quarried from local (Pittwater) sandstone), it contains many of the castellated features associated with such a historic piece of architecture – towers and turrets, a donjon (keep), battlements, vaults, a great hall, a coat-of-arms, etc.
This said, Bungan Castle lacks other standard features – a drawbridge with a portcullis and a barbican ; visible gargoyles; and a moat (although Edinburgh Castle also lacks a moat, being built up high on bedrock it doesn’t require one for defensive purposes); and it is also bereft of a dungeon! And of course, most telling, parts of the southern and eastern facades are clearly more ‘home’ than castle! One could easily dismiss any claim to it being thought of as an authentic facsimile of the “real thing” (some early observers described it, erroneously, as a ‘Norman’ castle), but with a bit of licence we can reasonably ascribe the descriptor (small) ‘castle’ to Bungan, much as New Zealand tourism promotes the lauded Lanarch ‘Castle’ on the Otago Peninsula (also without many of those classic features).
A family concern
GAW Albers’ prominence in the Northern Beaches area and the talking point uniqueness of Bungan Castle led many locals to dub the Sydney art dealer “the Baron of Bungan Castle”. Albers died in 1959 but the ‘baronial’ castle has remained firmly in family hands. The current owners are Albers’ nephew John Webeck and his wife Pauline. John maintains the family’s artistic bent as well, having like Uncle William had a career as an art dealer.
Artists’ Mecca? museum? both?
Webeck has signalled that he would like to reprise the castle’s former mantle as an artists’ Mecca, but I can’t help feeling that with such a wealth of out-of-the-ordinary artifacts within its walls, that its future might be most apt as an historical museum. Such suggestions have been made in the past – the Avalon Beach Historical Society referred to Bungan Castle having been an “unofficial repository for many articles, (sufficient to deem it) Pittwater’s first museum”[3].
—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇴—⇹—⇹—-⇹—⇹—⇹—⇸—⇸—⇸—⇸—
✲ the close proximity of larger beaches with on-site car parks (absent from Bungan) – Newport, The Basin and Mona Vale – make them a more popular choice for beach-goers
✪ at the time there was only three other homes on the entire headland
❇ Albers’ principal family home was in Gordon, not far way on the North Shore of Sydney
✤ although the bulk of the castle’s collection were donated to Albers by others who thought it an appropriate home
[1] WEM Abbott, ‘Castle on a Cliff Edge’, The Scone Advocate, 25-Mar-1949, http://nla.gov.au.news-article162719685
[2] ‘Castle Turrets on Sydney’s Skyline’ (Nobody Wants them…Our Baronial Halls), The Sun (Sydney), 08-May-1927, http://nla.gov.au.news-article223623550. The author of this article goes on to lament the fact that Sydney’s castle homes had fallen out of fashion for the well-heeled “princes of commerce” in search of a suitable ancestoral mansion…in 1927 their preference was apparently for modern Californian villas with all the latest conveniences.
[3] ‘A Visit To Bungan Castle By ABHS’, Pittwater Online News, 14-20 Oct 2018, Issue 379, www.pittwatetonlinenew.com
A Hospitable Park on the Point: From Canonbury to McKell
To the east of Farm Cove the contours of Sydney Harbour’s south shore pass several peninsulas that traverse through the scenic and exclusive Eastern Suburbs. The most affluent of these small peninsula suburbs are probably Point Piper (home of the most recent Australian prime minister to be deposed by his party) and Darling Point. Personifying Point Piper’s claim to suburban exclusivity is Wolseley Road, envied by realty obsessives for being the most expensive street or road for residential property in Australia, its status stands to those who care about such things as “the nation’s ultimate address” (sixteen of Sydney’s top 100 most expensive houses are located on this road) [‘Point Piper’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Darling Point (McKell’s) occasional wharf ⇓
Neighbouring Darling Point✲ rates almost as highly as ‘PP’ in the affluential stakes and has a history that is even more illustrious! The suburb retains many fine mansions from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is a mansion that is no more, that is the focus of this blog. The serene little, two-tiered park at the northern tip of Yarranabbe Point✤, McKell Park (named after a former state premier and governor-general) is the picturesque site that once housed Canonbury, a well-presented Gothic style mansion.
Canonbury (above), built in 1904 on the site of an earlier residence, Lansdowne, is a short 9-iron from another celebrated mansion, Lindesay – a villa in the Gothic Revival style named after a little known acting governor of the early colony and still standing. Lansdowne and (subsequently) Canonbury passed through many hands after the original grant of 6.9 hectare of land to James Holt in 1833.
Among the notable resident/owners of the properties at Yarranabbe Point have been Thomas Mitchell (explorer, colonial surveyor-general, 1820s-1830s), Charles Nicholson (statesman and early provost of Sydney University) and Harry Rickards (Vaudevillian theatre entrepreneur). Rickards gave the mansion the name ‘Canonbury’ after the suburb in North London where he had lived before emigrating to Sydney.
One of the many heritage-listed Yarranabbe gateposts ⇓
In 1919 Canonbury was purchased by the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) which charitably turned the property into a convalescent hospital for returning servicemen from the Great War. This theme continued during WWII when it was used as a naval hospital. After the war Canonbury was acquired by the NSW Government and became an annexe of the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Surry Hills.
By the end of the Seventies, with the annexe now surplus to Crown Street’s needs, the government decided to sell the site for redevelopment. The decision met with strong opposition from locals and after an earnest debate over its fate, custodianship of Canonbury was transferred to the Woollahra Municipal Council in 1983. Canonbury was demolished❂ and in 1985 the site remade as a public park with neat, box-shaped hedges and terraced lawns falling away to the shoreline [Jacobsen, Patricia, ‘McKell Park’, Dictionary of Sydney, 2016, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/mckell_park, viewed 28 Feb 2019]
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✲ named to honour the wife of the NSW colony’s 7th governor Ralph Darling…in the 19th century it was tagged as the “Mayfair of Australia”, [Anne-Maree Whitaker, ‘Darling Point: The Mayfair of Australia’ (unpublished MA Thesis, University of Sydney, 1983), 50, 51]
✤ pre-European settlement, the traditional owners of the peninsula were the Birrabirrgal people
❂ the small, on-site historic cottage (formerly the caretaker’s quarters) was preserved, along with archaeological remnants of Canonbury’s and Lansdowne’s foundations
Westfield, an Antipodean Commercial Property Phenomenon
The Westfield business group, after its recent merger with a Franco-Dutch real estate Goliath made it the largest commercial real estate corporation in the world, has come a long way from its humble beginnings in Blacktown, NSW nearly 60 years ago.
⇡ Westfield development signage, 1960s (Source: ‘Westfield History’)
The story begins with two postwar Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. They both arrive in Sydney in the early 1950s and both separately start up small businesses in western Sydney. Frank Lowy and John Saunders (originally Jeno Schwarcz) come into each other’s world when Lowy would regularly deliver small items to Saunders’ milk bar. The two hit it off and in 1955 they combine their skill sets and open a delicatessen together in Blacktown (outer western suburbs of Sydney).
Lowy’s road from small goods deliverer to nation-wide/international mall king
In July 1959 Saunders and Lowy, having adopted the one-stop-shopping model of US retailing and recognising the population growth potential of western Sydney, open their first shopping centre – Westfield Plaza❈ in Blacktown [‘Australia’s retail history – Westfield Parramatta’, 29-Sep-2017, www.arc.parracity.nsw.gov.au]. With 12 shops, two department stores and a supermarket, “people flocked to see the plaza which newspapers of the day described as the most modern American-type combined retail centre” [Scentre Group, (history), www.scentregroup.com].
Westfield Plaza of itself was not anything like a full-blown shopping mall on the American scale, but it did launch Westfield✥ on its skyward trajectory. In 1960 the Westfield Development Corporation was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange as a public company. According to the gurus of applied finance, such has been Westfield’s phenomenal success in the commercial property game that “anyone who had the foresight to invest $1000 in the fledgling Westfield group back in 1960 and (then) reinvested all the dividends back into stock would have a holding valued at $136 million” (as at 2004) [‘Lowy’s retail revolution’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26-Apr-2004, www.smh.com.au ].
⇡ Burwood Westfield Shoppingtown, 1966
Westfield Hornsby shopping centre (1961) opened two years after Blacktown…by 2018 there were about 36 Westfields in Australia, the majority in the eastern coast states of NSW, Victoria and Queensland❂. In 1977 Westfield took the plunge and moved into the American market. The first US Westfield mall was the Trumbull Shopping Park in Connecticut…by 2005 there were Westfields in 15 American states, many clustered together in particular cities (in 2018 the total number of Westfield malls in the US was given as 33). Worldwide there are over 103 Westfield shopping centres including in the UK, New Zealand, Italy, Croatia and Brazil [‘Westfield Group‘, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⇡ Westfield Eastgardens (NSW)
The Lowy/Westfield formula for success
Locating for growth: Unlike the mall pattern in America (developments on the edges of urban sprawl) Lowy and Saunders put their retail centre developments in places that were close to railway stations, in areas that were growing or were already built-up, allowing Westfield to “dominate the prime catchment areas for retail spending” [‘Sir Frank Lowy’s Great Australian success story’, Australian Financial Review, 14-Dec-2017, www.afr.com].
Westfield’s involvement in commercial property projects did not confine itself to solely building the shopping centre, but rather it retained an ongoing role in the venture through ownership of the investment portfolio. Thus, Westfield maintained a constant cash flow while its assets ensured it would be able to secure finance for future expansion. With the growth of department store retailing from the 1960s, it was specialist developers like the Westfield Group and Lend Lease who became the dominant players over time in the Australian landscape [‘Westfield’s history tracks the rise of the Australian shopping centre and show what’s to come’, (Louise Grimmer & Matthew Bailey), The Conversation, 13-Dec-2017), www.theconversation.com].
The challenge of online shopping
Lowy’s Westfield, like all 21st century retail industry players, has had to adjust to competing with the modern worldwide phenomena of the “digital revolution”. Large retail players losing market share to online sales have adopted strategies such as moving to “smaller, more carefully curated boutique stores in affluent areas” (eg, DJs, Debenhams UK), thereby severing their reliance on being inside big shopping malls [ibid.].
The advent of pop-up stores has also provided a challenge to established retail stores and malls in the 21st century. Uniqlo, In-N-Out Burgers, Niké, Nestlé, Coco-Cola, and numerous other businesses have established their pop-up presence in Australia over the last decade or so. The immediacy and flexibility of this retail mode have allowed them to drastically cut their overheads and take a share of the permanent entities’ market. Westfield’s response has been to rebrand its casual leasing division as the “Pop-up Department”, and thus making it easier for pop-ups to be accommodated within the Westfield shopping centre umbrella [ibid.].
⇡ Westfield Geelong (Vic.), 1986
In the face of growing online competition from e-commerce giants such as Amazon, the malls and large department stores have made concerted efforts to lure back lost customers…to take Westfield as an example again, the approach has been to try to enhance the in-store services available to customers, to provide “unique services and experiences” that would value-add to their visits in a way the online businesses couldn’t offer [ibid.]. This prompted a strategy change from Lowy◙, a refocus on “developing flagship stores in prime international retail sites, (and) developing shopping experiences, not just transactions”✦ [‘Sir Frank’ (AFR), loc.cit.].
The model for the new approach, as usual, has been the overseas malls, especially the US. These shopping enterprises, to entice the buying public to desert the online mode and return to the physical store, have taken to offering punters a new mix of leisure and entertainment options inside the malls. Shopping centres in Australia have already embraced some of these innovations⊙ (like upscale dining, cinema complexes, fitness clubs) and are certain to add many of the other mall features already in place in the US (eg, concert venues, day spas, art galleries, farmers’ markets) [Grimmer & Bailey, op.cit.].
Footnote: Remarkably on song as Frank Lowy’s business antennae has been, there have one or two lapses (over a sixty year span!) where Frank DID NOT emerge out of a deal with “laugh lines around his pocket” (a “Fred Daggism” (AKA John Clarke)) … probably the lowest point was Lowy trying to buy the TEN Network in the 1980s and getting his fingers badly burnt. Within the milieu of the mall Lowy has had a reputation for being a tough landlord. At one point Westfield Group was brought before the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) which found that Westfield had abused its market and commercial power. Lowy was forced to formally undertake to “not engage in unconscionable conduct and intimidation” of tenants [‘Westfield promises not to bully’, (Anthony Hughes), Sydney Morning Herald, 18-Jun-2004, www.smh.com.au].
⇡ Westfield’s founder & entrepreneurial driving force
PostScript: Nothwithstanding Westfield’s measures to try to counter the inroads made by the online merchandisers, Westfield, in line with the catch-all trend adversely affecting global retailing, had suffering a downturn in trade. Ultimately Lowy (and his sons) decided at the end of 2017 to sever their hold on the hitherto family business empire. Lowy meticulously and vigorously negotiated the sale of Westfield to international property giant Unibail-Rodamco, a societas Europaea (a public company set up under the auspices of the EU). The transaction netted the Lowy family a cool $32.7bn with the new merger entity taking the name Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield [‘Westfield: Lowy family sells shopping centre empire to French property giant’, (E Morgan & I Verrender), ABC News, 12-Dec-2017, www.mobile.abc.net.au].
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❈ some sources give the name as “Westfield Place”
✥ etymology: ‘West’ = the location in Sydney’s western suburbs \ ‘field’ = the first centre was located on subdivided farmland
❂ Burwood Westfield Shoppingtown (inner west Sydney) opened in 1966, was the first Westfield to carry the (now characteristic) company logo…it was also the first to contain a major department store – David Jones [1959 Westfield Place opens in Blacktown’, (Australian food history timeline), [www.australianfoodhistorytimeline.com.au]
◙ Westfield’s two-man partnership came to an end when co-founder John Saunders sold out his half of the business in 1987
✦ in 2014 the Westfield Group undertook a major organisational restructure, splitting into two entities – Scentre Group (Australasia) and Westfield Corporation (Europe and America)
⊙ the Chadstone Shopping Centre in Melbourne, for example, now has the Legoland Amusement Park within its walls