Before there was motion pictures, radio or television in Australia, variety theatre and vaudeville flourished as the form of public entertainment. In the first half of the 20th century two performers in the absolute vanguard of Australian vaudeville comedy were George Wallace and Roy Rene. Both these standout comedy stars of the Australasian theatre, at their career high-point, were extremely well paid. Each had his own distinctive style and persona, as well as particular strengths and weaknesses in the differing modes of comic performance attempted.
George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.
George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wallace-george-stevenson-8961/text15765, published first in hardcopy 1990, accessed online 4 April 2015]. The Wallace persona on stage and screen was that of a childlike man, portraying goggle-eyed, innocent characters well down on the social ladder, often farm boys, hicks and yokels ill at ease with women [Paul Byrnes, ‘George Wallace’, www.aso.gov.au]. The country bumpkin-cum-innocent in the big city association was further emphasised by George’s garb, comprising ill-fitting clothes and rumpled hat.
Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].
Roy Rene (born of part-Dutch ancestry, Harry Van Der Sluice) was a rival of sorts for Wallace in the interwar musical comedy theatre. Rene’s stage persona of ‘Mo’ and his successful partnership with Nat Phillips as “Stiffy and Mo” was the inspiration for Wallace to form “Dinks and Onkus”. Like Wallace, Rene started in ‘panto’ at 14 as “Boy Roy” in a Sydney production of Sinbad the Sailor. Rene’s popularity grew in musical comedy reviews all around Australia and NZ in the 1920s and 1930s. His theatrical career however was marked by tempestuous relationships with colleagues and proprietors. He broke up and then reunited with Phillips, and moved (sometimes sacked) from one theatre company to another (Princess Theatre, the National Amphitheatre, Fuller’s, Tivoli, Theatre Royal, etc) from one side of the continent to the other and on to New Zealand throughout his career.
Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), www.liveperformance.com.au ].
At the height of his career the wider public loved Mo’s humour and feted him as a great clown. The typically unrestrained expressions used by Rene in skits became the vogue, so much so that they entered the Australian lexicon. The numerous ‘Mo-isms’ that still colour the linguistic landscape of Australia include such perennial gems as “strike me lucky!”, ” you beaut!”, “strewth”, “cop that, young Harry”, “you little trimmer!”, “don’t come the raw prawn with me” and “fair suck of the sav” [‘Roy Rene’, www.skwirk.com].
Rene as a live performer was a forerunner of what a later generation would euphemistically call “working blue”. His work, especially in the Stiffy and Mo skits was punctuated with risqué humour and vulgar double entendre. One of their most celebrated routines had Mo, chalk in hand, saying to the “straight guy” Stiffy: “why is that whenever I write F you see K” (the audience apparently never got it at the time). How far Roy could be characterised as a “blue comic” is a moot point. A show biz contemporary of his, Bill Moloney in his autobiography, Memoirs of an Abominable Showman, cautions that this was more in the public’s perception than anything actually evident in Mo’s sketches. Moreover, in the light of the unfettered ‘blueness’ of later comics like Lenny Bruce and Rodney Rude, Mo’s ribald smuttiness comes across as very pale by comparison.
Roy as Mo struck a chord with the public partially perhaps because he was seen as being so far from being a hero, more of an everyman, and also because they saw him in the context of the Depression as a battler, an underdog barking back at his so-called ‘betters’ [ibid.]. At the peak of his fame a measure of his popularity were the stacks of unaddressed mail he received from his fans. Letters would somehow find their way to Roy Rene’s home or office with only the iconic, black and white image of Mo’s face scribbled where the address should appear on the envelope!
Inevitably the popularity of Mo led to attempts to establish Roy Rene as a film star. Strike Me Lucky! (1934) directed by Ken G Hall was not successful either critically or at the box office. The medium did not suit Rene who needed the spontaneity of performing before a live audience to feed off and sparkle at his best. The repetition of takes during scenes in movies was also to his distaste [Lesley Speed, ‘Strike Me Lucky: Social Difference and Consumer Culture in Roy Rene’s Only Film’ (Screening Australia), www.tlweb.latrobe.edu.au].
After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.
Because they possessed very different comedic styles, it is hard to detect any influences Rene and Wallace may have had on each other. Rene, hitting the boards a good decade before the younger man, led to him becoming the bigger star in the late 1910s to mid 1920s. The differences in style and content were quite pronounced: Rene’s speech drew on the broad Australian vernacular, he had an urban type of comedy influenced by the traditions of American Jewish (Yiddish) comedy. Roy/Mo was both raunchy and in-your-face in a way the simpler, more laid-back George/Onkus never was. Wallace was more influenced by the traditions and stories of the Australian bush (his adolescent years were largely spent working in the Queensland bush as a cane-cutter, horseman, dairy farming and the like). One critic has identified the influence of Charlie Chaplin on Wallace’s comedy in aspects like the use of athletic slapstick and the choice of costumes [Byrnes, op.cit.].
Wallace and Rene were gigantic figures in the first half of 20th century Australian variety entertainment, both were quintessentially Australian, both had exemplary timing in their comic delivery. The two plied the same trade but stylistically and temperamentally they were very different vaudeville comics. The two comedians did ultimately have one curious connexion: both men died in the same small Sydney suburb of Kensington, six years apart.
‘Mo Mac’ with another great master of comedy, Stan Laurel
Postscript: I have not included Jim Gerald within the purview of this survey. ‘Diabolo’ Gerald, the rubbery-faced clown, a contemporary of Rene and Wallace, was a theatrical performer who rightly deserves a place in the trio of 20th century Australian vaudeville comic greats. Gerald however differs from the other two Australia-focused comedians. He was more international in outlook, sourcing a large amount of his material during trips abroad, and working overseas extensively, eg, touring South Africa, Asia, North America; as part of the AIF Entertainment Unit in the Middle East and the Mediterranean during WWII; plus starring in a series of cinematic shorts in Hollywood during the silent era.
Not long after the news spread about the momentous event at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, the significance of what the Wrights’ had done found itself under challenge, especially as time went on from the European aviation community. French newspapers after 1903 described the celebrated American brothers as bluffeurs (bluffers). Doubts were raised about their achievements when the Wrights failed to release the photo of the Wright Flyer in flight at Kitty Hawk until nearly five years after the groundbreaking 1903 flight … newspapers acerbically asked: “Were they fliers or liars?”, Paris edition of the New York Herald (10 Feb 1906); ‘Wright Brothers: European skepticism’, www.spiritus-temporis.com.
As well, in the 30 years preceding Kitty Hawk, there was a host of aviation pioneers experimenting with monoplanes, biplanes, box-kites and gliders including, 1874: Félix du Temple; 1894: Hiram Maxim; 1894: Lawrence Hargrave; 1898: Augustus Moore Herring [B Kampmark, ‘Wright Brothers: Right or Wrong?’, Montréal Review (April 2013]. These flights however were either pre-power ones, or if motorised, they have been largely discredited as having been either unsustained, uncontrolled or as at the least not sufficiently controlled [P Scott, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919].
G A Whitehead was a German migrant (born Gustave Weisskopf) living in Connecticut who started experimenting with gliders (variations on the glider prototype design developed by aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal) in the mid-1890s, at a time when Wilbur and Orville were still making and repairing bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. The case in support of the flight made by Whitehead on 14 August 1901 in what must be noted was an improbable-looking, bat-shaped, engine-propelled glider at Fairfield near Bridgeport, was first taken up in 1935 (in an article in an industry magazine, Popular Aviation, entitled ‘Did Whitehead Precede Wright In World’s First Powered Flight?’)回. Whitehead’s claim lay dormant until the 1960s when army reservist William O’Dwyer, took up the German-American engine-maker’s cause and did his upmost to promote his “flying machine”.
Critics of the Institute believe that the Smithsonian’s indebtedness to the Wrights’ legacy (the fear of losing the historic Flyer to the estate executors) prevents it from recognising the merits of Whitehead’s pioneering achievement irrespective of the weight of evidence put forward [J Liotta, ‘Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence’, www.news.nationalgeographic.com]. Clearly this is a powerful disincentive to the Smithsonian objectively assessing the merits and new evidence for any rival claims to the Wrights (not just Whitehead’s) which may be unearthed.
The credence given to the Wright brothers’ claim to be the first successful flyers should perhaps come with an asterisk, signifying it as heavily qualified, as in David Schneider’s all-inclusive, tongue-in-cheek description: “First in Sustained, Piloted, Controlled, Powered, Heavier-than-air Flight of Lasting Technological Significance” [ibid].
Did any of the documented early flights per se achieve “sustained and controlled flight”? Human conquest of the sky didn’t happen in one quantum leap, surely it came about in a series of small, measured steps, each building on the one before. It is more meaningful to see the development of viable flying machines as something that happened incrementally, an aerodynamic puzzle put together piece-by-piece. It was an international effort, the culmination of the accumulated efforts of gifted pioneering aeronautical designers such as George Cayley, Octave Chanute, Samuel Langley, Lawrence Hargrave and Otto Lilienthal whose experiments made it possible for the Wrights and others to experiment with flight, coming closer and closer to the realisation of successful manned, powered flight.
In the early 1900s the Aquarium was purchased by theatrical entrepreneur William Anderson who revamped the complex (now renamed ‘Wonderland City’). Under Anderson, the ‘Airem Scarem’ (an airship tracked on a cable from cliff to cliff), an artificial lake and open-air ice skating rink, was added to the entertainment venue. A haunted house and maze further underlined Wonderland City’s position as a precursor to the later Luna Park at Milson’s Point. The opening night in 1906 lured an estimated 20,000 visitors (during summer-time on weekends 2,000 Sydneysiders regularly attended the Wonderland park).
