Council Dilemmas

Postwar the Tweed and Byron Shires were caught with insufficient housing and inadequate infrastructure to handle the rapid population growth. In particular, settlement and development on leaseholds was taking place at such a rate that Council resources couldn’t cope with the demand for new and upgraded roads and bridges. In early 1947 the Tweed Shire applied to the Valuer-General for a reassessment of land values, but it transpired that the collapse in dairy farm values only meant a valuation increase of an average 9% in the rural areas while Murbah itself jumped 37% and Tweed Heads 26%. The banana growers however, had to swallow a packet of bex. Dairy farms came in at an average of £12/12/- per acre, while banana land, previously valued at a token amount because it was useless farming land, averaged £25/6/- per acre. Nevertheless, the dairy farmers were the major providers of leased banana patches and they were stuck with the rate increases, passed on to their lessees through rent increases. Prior to the valuations rent ranged from £3 to £6, but at a heated whingers’ meeting one bloke claimed the dairy farmer on 290 acres from whom he leased his 27acre plantation, which had jumped in value from £75 to £700, was now increasing the rent to unviable levels.  The very courageous representative of the Valuer-General’s Department who attended the meeting said the increases were modest given that he had evidence of banana land changing hands for up to £120 per acre. By early 1949 however, banana plantations were reverting to grazing land and the farmers were demanding revaluations.

Despite developments in the countryside, Murbah itself was the centre of the largest population growth. Figures for 1947 show a growth of 24% from prewar levels (5084 in 1939 to 6320 in 1947), while the rural part of the Murbah Police District only grew 15% (7344 to 8200). The Murbah businesses also had a catchment area extending into adjoining districts, attracting at least another 2000 shoppers, and experienced boom times after 1948 with the lifting of rationing and price controls. Byron Shire’s growth on the other hand, up 25% in the two years to mid 1947, was mostly in the banana growing hills around Mullum. Mullum itself had a population of 1609 at this time with a concomitant building boom. 

By early 1950 housing was still scarce despite the postwar boom generating the greatest building activity in Mullum’s history, with the average house changing hands for just over £1000 and land valuations up 54%. Since the end of the war over 100 new houses had been built, including some by the Housing Commission, and by 1950 a rate of about 30 new houses per year was still being sustained. The houses were necessarily ‘cheap’ because of the still current restrictions on the type of construction due to the lingering postwar shortage of building materials. Things started to level off in 1952 when building activity dropped a big 36% on the previous year. Conversely, the surrounding Byron shire recorded 39 new houses in 1952, with another 52 in 1953, perhaps suggesting most banana growers were electing to live on site rather than settle in town.

Postwar prosperity at Murbah also continued apace, with Main Street values up 100% in the 4yrs to early 1951. In the countryside however, values only rose an average of 10% an acre, propped up by banana land, while the dairying districts of Tyalgum and Uki suffered a 10% fall. Nevertheless, up went the rates despite the automatic income gain from the valuation increases.

A comfortable future looked assured and Mullum business houses began spending money upgrading their premises, including The Empire and The Popular, which were both given makeovers and introduced the latest neon signs. Mullum, still an island in the sea of the Byron Shire with its own Municipal Council, had 1208 eligible voters on the rolls by the end of 1950. A sign of the times and fascination with all things modern was Mallams relegation of pure silk stockings to 5/- a pair in favour of nylon at 6/- a pair. The hot little nylon numbers had hit 11/6d a pair in 1948 after rationing and price fixing ceased.

Despite the lingering glut, during 1949 the Tweed banana industry still brought home £787,564, almost a third of the entire income from rural production in that district. The headlined story Spirit of Despair in Dairying succinctly summarized the situation in that industry, which nevertheless still brought in £1,223,241 from the combined Tweed and Brunswick production during 1949. (But late that year the Liberal/Country Coalition regained control of the purse and rural socialism was back in vogue - for the year 1950/51 the subsidy to the dairy industry leaped to £15million and for 1951/52 jumped to £17.8million, prompting farmers to bring their cows out of retirement, at least till the late 50s when the regional herd again started to be pensioned off.) The sand mining industry had yet to peak and for 1949 produced £290,000 worth of rutile and other minerals from the five companies operating between Tweed Heads and Byron Bay, four of which were around Cudgen. The combined companies only gave employment to 163 people at this time, but were expanding rapidly.

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Begin the Benign

Postwar the resurrected Star was a benign influence in Mullum and district, with sport dominating the front page and social happenings on the inside. The term ‘alien’ was consigned to the archives and the label ‘New Australian’ started to stick, although it took a while before the general populace dropped the term ‘reffo’. Reports of the goings on at the RSL and BGF meetings were mundane until the mid 1950s when the economic viability of bananas was again looming as a threat to the growth of Mullum. Anzac Day in 1950 dominated the front page, headlined with ‘Greek Community’s Tribute to Anzacs’, and singling out the enormous wreath laid by Tony Peters …it was only natural that the thoughtful gesture of the Greek community should be received with special warmth. … in view of its special significance, it was not taken to the cemetery with the other wreaths but placed on the stage of the Memorial Hall during the concert at night so that it might be seen by all.

The banana industry was still the leading income generator, with banana land so sought after that an irreplaceable nine acre experimental plantation of macadamias, established at Palmwoods by the late Mr Gaggin with every nut variety 20 years earlier, was destroyed in 1950 and converted to bananas. He had initially planted out 40 acres of macas in 1926, with another 11 acres added in the late 1930s, but poor returns saw it all gradually whittled away as bananas gained the ascendancy.

Prosperity was given another boost in early 1951 when £90,000 was paid out in war gratuities to 950 ex-servicemen at Murbah. Similar amounts were paid out all over the region and the spending spree had a flow-on down the line. At this time the Caponas real estate agency had a 4yr old, fully producing 6 acre lease on its books going for £600, compared to a two room house on a 40ftx150ft freehold block in Argyle Street for £420. Eighteen months later he was advertising a 10-acre patch, with 3 acres irrigated, for £1500 at the same time a house in town was going for £1800. Most growers could also now afford the must have, the Holden Ute, going for £785 in 1951.

In 1952 acreage and production bottomed out and from here it was ever upwards. At the same time a prolonged drought and severe winter cut supplies, driving up prices and adding to the rejoicing. The area devoted to the golden bonanza in NSW had been reduced to 24,193 acres, and the Brunswick Valley had surpassed the Tweed to be the leading banana maker in the country, albeit by knocking out only 373,000 cases, a decrease of over 100,000 from the previous year. The exodus from the industry had ceased and there were now 3880 commercial growers, almost 800 less than the peak glut year of 1948, ready for the roller coaster ride to the next boom. At the BGF AGM at Murbah in late 1953 the chairman reported that the highest prices ever received for bananas were recorded for the 1952/53 season, and presciently expressed doubt that a similar set of circumstances will ever exist again after 350 growers returned to the game. The following year another 460 returned and again the Bruns was the largest banana growing area in the country. And again bananas were the most extensively planted crop by far throughout the whole Richmond-Tweed region, exceeding maize (~11,000 acres) and sugar cane (~10,000 acres).

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Minor Hassles

Mullum continued to enjoy a period of great prosperity and in such feel good times scapegoats are unnecessary so the overt wartime sport of wog walloping went out of favour until the next crisis, although certain wogs were included in the ‘Reds under Beds’ bogey boys used for political purposes. They were made the main election issue for Mr Anthony in early 1951, with his opening salvo a two page spread in the Star-Advocate devoted almost entirely to the misguided followers of Mr Marx. This election was won with a staggering 76% of the vote (Mullum 82%) over the hapless ALP opponent, Mr A. L. Bryen of the Richmond-Tweed Trades and Labour Council. Mr Anthony was helped along by the Chairman of the BGF who, right in the middle of the campaign, came out with some prominently headlined comments: Some migrants from behind the Iron Curtain should have been left there…. Instead of building the country many New Australians were settling in the cities, where they would become a liability and cause a depreciation of living standards by creating slums…and they think that Australians were under a compliment for their presence…. Thick-headed Australians are the only ones suitable for working the soil – according to these New Australians…. The tried and proven migrants from Britain and Western Europe should be encouraged… doo wah diddy diddy…

Only one letter of protest was published – signed by anonymous ‘New Australian’ who was scared that all wogs were being tarred with the same brush: … I feel deep regret for such a bitter declaration as Mr Murphy’s and I consider it very dangerous on account of the effect of public opinion… to create a minority who are easy targets…. What naughty boys we are!… Tsk tsk. At this time banana acreage was still falling and growers still deserting the industry, primarily because they couldn’t get labourers. Postwar prosperity had brought almost full employment and nobody, apart from migrants, was prepared to accept the 2/6d to 3/3d per hour being offered by banana growers for chippers. The Commonwealth Employment Service was still mainly allotting migrants to the sugar industry, but each year a number stayed to enter the dairying and banana industries. In early 1952 they, mainly Italians and Dutch, started to be directly allotted to dairy farms.

After the election Mr Anthony claimed a mandate to come to grips with the problems created by the Communist Party…. A few months later the referendum to ban the Communist Party failed, but Richmond returned one of the strongest ‘Yes’ votes anywhere, albeit with a swing away from the huge majority obtained along party lines at the election. A few stones thrown at he and Arty Fadden while campaigning at Coolangatta didn’t do any harm. The following election of 1954 saw him elected unopposed with not even a token grumpy independent prepared to have a go. The Richmond electorate didn’t have to go to the polls on the appointed day but the inflexible officials still closed the pubs, causing a bit of anguish in town for those who like a drink on a hot day or the whingeing lefties who wanted to drown their political sorrow.

These blokes would have been happy with the referendum result at the end of the year that ended the 6 o’clock swill and extended trading hours to 10pm. Despite the overwhelming State-wide result Mullum remained firmly conservative, voting 850 to 516 to retain 6 o’clock closing. Murbah was marginal at 1543 to 1475, while overall the Tweed shire was for 10pm and the Byron shire agin. The referendum marked a major step in the evolution of Australian pub culture, but was also the first nail in the coffin of the traditional café as the pub's lounge bars became the preferred evening meeting places.

While the papers were starting to empathize with ‘New Australians’ there must have been something bubbling below the surface in the community to necessitate Tony Peters, by then the main spokesman for the Greek community, to make a plea for tolerance to the Brunswick district through the platform of the Rotary Club’s annual dinner in August 1951. Amongst other stuff, he referred to a recent Gallop poll which found that Greeks, Italians and Yugoslavs, the predominant groups in the Mullum and Murbah districts, were the least preferred non English migrants, coming in behind the Germans who were fourth most favoured after the Dutch, Swedes and French. Passionate wartime animosities don’t last long.

Tony was a fine advocate for the Greek community in trying to educate the locals on matters Greek. A few months later he again addressed the Rotary Club with the history of Greece and shortly afterwards was instrumental in establishing a ‘sister club’ relationship with the Rotary Club of Athens. Towards the end of the year he arranged for the manager of the Commonwealth Employment Service in Lismore to give an address to the club on the employment and settlement of ‘New Australians’ in the district. The manager urged the establishment of a branch of the ‘New Settler’s League’ by Mullum citizens to help foster assimilation. The Mayor subsequently convened a meeting and, on the motion of Canon Rowe, duly formed the 29^th branch on 14Nov52, with Tony Peters as President, the Presidents of Rotary, Apex and the CWA as Vice Presidents and other prominent community members as office holders. Theo Psaltis and Messrs W. Bouveret and J. De Maar were elected to the committee. In late 1954 Tony was presented with an award by the District Governor of Rotary for his efforts as the local club’s ‘International Spokesman’. Two years earlier he had also been presented with an award by The Royal Shipwreck Relief and Humane Society of NSW after he had dived fully clothed into the Brunswick to save a young girl from drowning.

And hats off to the Rotarians who were always to the fore in assisting the New Australians ease into the community. All the ‘Balt’ cane cutters temporarily allotted to the Tweed in 1948 were welcomed into the homes of members, while one, the headmaster of Condong school, Mr N.J. Hutchenson, gave them English lessons in his own time.

Nevertheless, the Tweed was a bit recalcitrant when it came to coming to terms with the huge influx of new ockers. In mid 1952 the New Settlers League of NSW had written to the Tweed Shire Council urging the establishment of a branch of the League at Murbah, but the President figured there were not enough migrants in the District to warrant it and would be better applied to districts where there was a ‘colony of foreigners’. The District Employment Officer disagreed, saying that 700 migrants were permanently established in the Tweed district. And added, perhaps with a touch of hyperbole, this was more than any other district in New South Wales…. Most of them were settling down in banana work…. Six weeks later he gave an update and said there were now 750 making up the plague upon the Tweed. And 6mths after that, at the eventual formation of Murbah’s League, he described the Tweed as a ‘League of Nations’ with representatives of 30 nationalities … and the predominant race was Greek.

The Shire Council had taken its cue from the Tweed-Brunswick District Council of the RSL, which two weeks prior to the Shire Council decision had held a meeting devoted entirely to the plague problem. …that New Australians who had adopted Australia as their new home should be forced to speak the English language in public and that they should be denied privileges denied to the native Australians (whatever they were)…. They congregate in the streets, openly speaking their own ‘dialect’,…. A contract seems to mean nothing to them….the majority of them are ‘hooligans’ and fight amongst themselves… some would stop at nothing to be deported… ‘Somebody might even be killed before long and that is why we should do something now’….. They should be made to respect the older Australians…. ‘Those coming in now are the riff-raff of Southern European countries…. There were too many southern Europeans… these should be sent back and the much better northern Europeans sent out…. ‘The Swedes, Germans and other Northern people are of the same quality as the British. They are the type we want in this country. ‘The Yugoslavs and other southern migrants are weak and lazy and not good workers, and as such are no good to us… something had to be done before the position grew more serious…. The country was saddled with the ‘undesirables’… they should conform to the Australian standard of living…bom diddy bom bom….

This broadside met an ineffectual defence until Rotary provided reinforcements. A couple of New Australians also stuck their heads up, both taking the light-hearted approach of the earlier anonymous New Australian. They were educated blokes and attempted to take the mickey with a bit of humour, but the RSL was unrepentant. The RSL still enjoyed the highest standing in the community at this time, with an influence way ahead of that from Chambers of Commerce, Progress Associations and the like, but Rotary was climbing the pedestal. It lent its muscle a week later with ‘Good Citizen’s Week’, and a week after the formation of the Mullum New Settlers League began laying the groundwork for the formation of a Murbah branch, after which the Tweed Daily itself became more proactive in lending its considerable weight. By mid 1954 the local rag had turned around completely and even risked a campaign for an end to the White Australia policy.

The main driving force within Rotary was Jack Sattler, Headmaster of Murbah Primary, who had been conducting English classes on his own initiative and in his own time for a fair period. He was elected first President of the League after Rotary was finally in a position to call a meeting and form the Tweed district branch on 9Apr53. More than 50 people from 18 different community organizations attended, but alas there wasn’t one New Australian elected to the executive or committee. Great plans were made for welfare and social activities, but it seems the New Australians probably sensed a touch of paternalism as the first function only attracted 3 Italians, 2 Germans and a Czech, who were vastly outnumbered by the attending community representatives. At this time the Greeks and Macedonians had already pre-empted the aim of the League by looking after their own through the earlier formation of the respective Greek Community of the Tweed and The Macedonian People’s League. The Italians on the Tweed later drifted to the Mullum branch, particularly after Gino Pagura became president. The Greeks and Italians were also the most prominent players in Lismore, where they not only helped their own nationals but were also the main organisers in introducing all New Australians to the League and other community organizations. Lismore Rotary, the first formed on the north coast, with Angelo Crethar as a foundation member, also introduced the ‘adopt a New Australian family’ scheme.

The Murbah League’s only source of funds was membership subscription fees, chook raffles and donations. They battled on until the mid 1950s when Harold Lundberg, a Swede, became Shire President and joined the League council, and Joe Papajcsik, Hungarian, became the League’s vice president. Joe’s exceptional daughter, Ili, topped the North Coast in her Leaving Certificate year at Mullum High in 1963, just pipping Sven Ostring, a Finn of Main Arm. That same year Ric Papajcsik of the Mullum Judo Club took out the Queensland and Australian championships.

The formation of the Murbah League was handicapped by some more unfortunate alien agitation, probably contributing to migrants keeping their heads down. Wide publicity had been given to a plan by the Italian Chamber of Commerce and an Italian banking firm to sponsor 100 families, to the tune of £1500 each, and settle them on 5000 acres in the Tweed and Richmond districts. The Murbah Chamber of Commerce and the Tweed-Richmond Regional Development Committee had come out in favour of the proposal, with everything going along swimmingly until a bloke named Doug Anthony wrote a ‘Letter-to-the-Editor’, after which the BGF and most of the Tweed-Brunswick RSL branches decided they didn’t want a bar of it. …This immigration must stop. We don’t want these aliens here……ra ra bom de ay…. It kept going for a couple of months until the Italian Consul and the Minister for Lands threw in the towel. Later in the year a similar plan by the Dutch drew no comment.

In the meantime Tony Peters saw a bit of mischief making and convened a special meeting of the Mullum ‘New Citizens League’ in mid May. One hundred and fifty people, both Australians and migrants, represented by seven different nationalities, attended the Presbyterian Hall to hear Tony outline local efforts at assimilation. The evening finished with a demonstration of ‘ethnic’ vocals, music and dancing.

Cr.Tom Mott, ever the maverick and by then a long standing member of the Byron Council and prominent Brunswick Heads personality, also may have smelt a rat and broke with tradition at the Coronation celebrations in June 1953. While all the other speakers sang the praises of the British stock which had made the Empire great, Cr Mott in his address referred to the vanishing race of aboriginal Australians. He called forward two young Aborigines, Andrew and Neta Boyd, of Middle Pocket, as representatives of the race…… He also referred to Stella Marlowe, Coral Ivy and Lillia and Lola Noter, of Middle Pocket but formerly of The New Hebrides. The finest gesture we ‘new’ Australians can offer to these original Australians and to these neighbours from the islands is equality regardless of colour or creed……. He got a little ahead of the times.

And then in early July along came the inquest into the goings-on at Crabbes Creek. The Tweed Daily gave it prominent headlines all week and it was widely reported in all the regional rags as well as metropolitan papers, which sent their own journalists to sit in. At the conclusion of proceedings the Daily followed the Mullum Star into political correctness and made no editorial pontifications, published no BGF or RSL sermons, nor any letters-to-the-editor. The Sydney Daily Telegraph on the other hand entertained its readers with embellished tales of the barbaric custom of the feud and vendetta, and other lurid stuff, which got up the nose of the National Secretary of MAPL, then Sydney based. That his indignant response wasn't published by the Tele made him even more indignant.

Locally however, the only newspaper comments that slipped through were brief reports of the meetings of Kyogle and Lismore RSL sub branches where considerable discussion over the recent inquiry into events at Crabbes Creek… took place. And their main concern was the fact that several people there had lived in the country for 15yrs and still could not speak English…. At one stage of the inquest one of the independent interpreters from Brisbane, Con Papas, was translating Bulgarian to Greek, and vice versa, while the other, Andrew Samios, then turned the Greek into English, and vicky vee, causing in one case a one word answer to take three minutes to emerge from a witness. The coroner lost a lot of hair – I don’t know at times whether I’m listening to grand opera or Gilbert and Sullivan - but one of the beneficial results was a strong recommendation for structured English classes.

The Immigration Department, also represented at the inquest, quickly established formal English classes through Jack Sattler, but it took a while to get off the ground. It turned out that the majority of banana growers and their labourers were too exhausted at the end of the day to journey into Murbah for evening classes. Later in the year class attendance built to seventeen migrants, but most were transient cane cutters from Tumbulgum fulfilling their Government contracts. The classes gradually faded away when numbers fell below the required minimum of six and weren’t re-established until mid 1955 when the Government provided specially produced textbooks and made tuition free. By this time the Government also had started correspondence courses and wireless lessons, but nobody in the banana growing hills could pick them up. A few months prior to this the local Commonwealth Employment Officer had singled out Greeks and Italians as less anxious to learn to speak, read or write English than other European migrants, like the Scots and Irish, but by this time the Greeks had hired their own English teacher.

[The Government had started a radio programme called 'For New Australians' in mid 1949, letting the new ockers hear simple spoken English, but it was very elementary, basically reinforcing pronunciation with constant repetition. While the ABC and the Dept of Ed started to progressively refine the broadcasts from mid 1950, but still rudimentary stuff for beginners, the only way to learn properly was to attend classes or enrol in correspondence courses. Around mid1953 the Dept of Ed began widely advertising  'radio booklets' to accompany the weekly 15 minute broadcasts. They were free on request, as were the correspondence courses. After the Murbah inquiry the Dept of Immigration progressively established free evening classes in other population centres. But it seems that it wasn't until about 1956 that they began to reach out to immigrants beyond the larger population centres and widely advertise (in English language newspapers) the classes and free correspondence courses to supplement the radio broadcasts. The Macedonians did a 'cut and paste' of the English language advert into their Makedonska Iskra newspaper: 'Any branch of the Good Neighbour Movement can give you an enrolment card... ]

Another offshoot of the Crabbes Creek inquiry was a survey of local newsagents, which disclosed that Greek newspapers were the only foreign language papers stocked, and according to one agent this was a good thing as he considered that for their own benefit New Australians should not receive foreign language publications… They should forget about their native tongue and make an all-out effort to master the English language. These people will be more quickly assimilated…. The Macedonians of Crabbes Creek and environs separately subscribed to the left-leaning Makedonska Iskra (Macedonian Spark) published in Sydney at this time, but later Melbourne.

Any community debate however, was all overtaken by events when the devastating Ithacan earthquake of August 1953 intervened. The Mullum Rotarians were first away with an approach to Mr Stephens MLA, to whom they presented a list prepared by the local Ithacans of relatives left homeless, and requested him to expedite their immigration. Stephens in turn approached Mr Holt MHR, Minister for Immigration, whose published reply indicated that preference under the immigration scheme would be given to all Greeks so affected and that compliance with normal formalities would be minimized. In the meantime the local club approached Rotary International with a request for financial assistance to have the relatives brought to Australia by plane. And at the same time the Mullum RSL agreed to coordinate the Greek Aid Fund, which accumulated over £500 in a very short time, most of it from donations by the Greek community. Thousands of Greeks on Ithaca, Cephalonia and Zante were left homeless because of the earthquake, which also destroyed the bulk of their ancient monumental heritage. Fifty of the ~2000 buildings in the Ithacan capital of Vathi were left standing. [And the emergency ‘Dexion’ housing and hospitals were provided by Dimitri John Comino OBE, BSc (Eng), born 1902 Sydney, the nephew of the illustrious ‘Oyster King’, Athanasios Dimitri Comino (Skordilli) of Evans Head. Dimitri invented ‘Dexion’, the ubiquitous slotted angle metal shelving and storage system, and founded the firm Dexion-Comino International in 1947.]

Rotary was also to the fore in the Tweed district where the president became Chairman of the Appeal Committee at the invitation of Nick Angus, president of the Greek Community of the Tweed. They raised over £650 within a few days, 95% of it from individual Greeks and Macedonians. Twin Towns Rotary, under the presidency of Eric Diamond, also raised heaps. From then on it was good news week every week for migrants, raising the suspicion that the local rags had been issued with an overnight Government ‘D Notice’. Any rumblings in the community over undesirable dagoes never made it to the papers, which started dropping gratuitous editorial advice to their readers on how to be nice to migrants and preaching The Golden Rule… ‘do unto others’….

Towards the end of the year an indication that accommodation of ‘New Australians’ was emerging occurred when the Bruns Surf Club decided to erect warning signs in Italian, Yugoslav, Greek and whatever other foreign language is most commonly spoken in the district. Nevertheless, while the olive skinned southern Europeans were gradually finding acceptance, despite some people in our midst who are apathetic towards assimilation of New Australians according to the committee of the Mullum New Settlers League on 27Nov53, the darker skinned Asians were still having a hard time. The White Australia Policy was alive and well, and the preceding week saw Vishnu Deo Singh before the Mullum court being sentenced to six months prison pending deportation as a ‘prohibited immigrant’ following his failure to pass the infamous dictation test in Estonian. He was an educated bloke and addressed the court in perfect English. Hopefully prison taught him not to get smart in a Mullum court.

And an indication that the campaign by the Tweed Daily, Rotary, the New Settlers League and others was bearing fruit in the Tweed District was the success of the 1953 New Settlers Christmas party at the Murbah Primary School when 65 New Australians, representing 15 nationalities, emerged from their bunkers to merge with 150 Australians. Each received a gift of a hanky. The cost of the function was underwritten by many organizations, including the RSL and the Crabbes Creek Cane Growers Association.

Over the following 12mths the Murbah League gathered strength as its monthly socials at the Primary school attracted an increasing number of New Australians. The average attendance was about 50, half of whom were New Australians, with Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican and Catholic Church groups taking it in turn to do the catering. And at the Christmas party of 1954 the League’s work was given the imprimatur of Mr Anthony MHR, Mr Stephens MLA and the Shire President who attended the first of the revamped naturalization ceremonies at the Church of England Parish hall preceding the party. A Greek Macedonian (Chris Dimakis) and 3 Romanians were the privileged guests-of-honour. In late 1956, at the conclusion of The Tweed’s first banana festival, the occasions were again made more ceremonious when 16 New Australians were created, with Messrs Anthony and Stephens again in attendance.

At the same time the Murbah coroner was conducting his second recent inquest into the suicide of a migrant. He found loneliness to be the cause and lack of education on the part of the deceased and lack of understanding by some educated persons who were responsible for his emigration to Australia, but his recommendation that all strangers to our country now living with us do all they can to make friends with us ran contrary to the aim of the League and put the boot firmly on the other foot. A couple of bungled suicide attempts were also given prominence, with one bloke given leniency by the sentencing magistrate because he was a finer type of migrant than many others. By early 1957 the number of migrants coming to the Tweed had fallen away, but the monthly parties of the New Settlers League, now the Good Neighbour Council, continued to be the only social life for some new Australians.

Not only the migrants were heading for the cities. As early as 1949 the Tweed Daily was lamenting the drift of young people from the district …. Through the 50s this remained a big concern for the editor and letter writers who mainly pointed out the better living conditions, better pay and shorter working hours of city living along with more opportunities for social life …. Slaving away on the family dairy farm was no longer one of the great joys in life. Ironically, the agrarian myth is now the major reason for the reverse migration to acreage blocks.

By mid 1954 Mullum had a population of 2017, up 25% over the past seven years and making it the fastest growing of the main population centres on the Far North Coast, ahead of Lismore, Murbah, Casino, et al, and surpassing Byron Bay which came in with a growth of 7% to 2001. This growth was matched only by Coffs Harbour and district, where there were also many Greeks and Macedonians running around planting bananas like they were going out of fashion. Arguably, it was the influx of New Australians that was responsible for a large part of the Mullum increase, although word of the new gold rush was spreading and once again bringing opportunists from all over to make a quick quid. However, these growth figures hide a more ominous trend in the countryside. In the surrounding Byron Shire, excluding the Bay itself, the population fell by 0.2%, indicating that the increase of banana growers was not sustaining the loss from the dairy industry or the drift of the young to the cities and larger regional centres. The Tweed Shire, excluding Murbah and Tweed Heads, had a net population loss of 3%. Even so, the Brunswick district, inclusive of the Byron shire and Mullum municipality, remained the most densely populated rural area in the State, followed by the Tweed and Richmond districts.

The glut of 1954/55 was the beginning of the end to this growth as the banana growers began to join the dairy farmers in the exodus from the district and region. By late 1955 continued low banana prices in the Tweed district have caused an exodus from the district of hundreds of unskilled labourers. The men, seeking higher wages and regular employment, have gone to the industrial cities where work is readily available. An authority in Murwillumbah said yesterday that hundreds of men had gone – a large number of them to the Wollongong steelworks. Accommodation has proved a deterrent to many who would have gone…. At this time Andrew Alidenes in the Mullum district was leading the push for financial assistance to the banana industry to prevent this very problem.

The Tweed dairy industry was suffering the greatest haemorrhaging on the north coast. From its dominant position in 1939 with 912 registered dairies, by 1950 125 had gone out of business, placing it third after Kyogle and Terania. Thereafter closures accelerated and by 1960 another 162 had pensioned off their cows, an overall slump of 32%. The Byron Shire suffered a 20% slump over the same period, from 681 registered dairies in 1939 to 544 in 1960, but just retaining fourth place on the north coast ladder of dairy producers. In the 20yr period to 1972, just before Saint Gough showed mercy in turning off the Country Party subsidy drip, the Tweed dairy farmers shed 70% of their herd, placing the shire sixth in the Richmond-Tweed cow hierarchy, while Byron took third spot.

The census of 1954 also showed just over a 100 Greeks in and around Mullum, where they were the dominant migrant group after the Brits, and just over 120 scattered around the Tweed, where they were the third largest group after the Brits and Italians, the latter having overtaken the Greeks with a greater rate of postwar migration. Not included amongst the Greeks were the many Cypriots who were still designated as British citizens at this time. The Mullum community was the largest enclave of postwar Greeks in rural NSW after that of Queanbeyan, where the Macedonians comprised a big slice of the baklava. There were 885 non-English migrants in the Tweed-Byron district, 3% of the population, with the Italians almost on a par with the Greeks in the Byron district, but pipping the Greeks by 50 on the Tweed. In the combined districts, the total number of Greeks, Yugoslavs and Italians was 558, just under 1.7% of the population, showing what havoc a handful of dagoes and wogs can wreck on a conservative rural social fabric.

The Tweed-Byron district increased by 2351 people, 882 of whom were post war immigrants, inclusive of the Brits, Kiwis, etc. The net gain however, was only 491 overseas born (verses 1860 Australian born), implying that the migrants had a high turnover rate in the banana plantations. Despite the postwar mass migration scheme the district was not attracting its pro rata share of the shiploads and planeloads arriving in the country daily; luckily perhaps - if they had come it would have been a whole new banana and dago game. By 1954 migrants had increased their immediate postwar proportion of the Tweed-Byron population by only 1% to reach 7.4%, about where it remained stuck for sometime until starting to increase in the last 20yrs to reach today’s 14%. Conversely, migrants made up 14% of the NSW population in 1954 and steadily increased to be 23% by 2001. So the weepin’ and wailin’ in the Rainbow Region was and is small bikies compared to the anguish being suffered in the rest of the State.

Acceptance of New Australians continued to gather pace with the Mullum CWA holding a soiree for over 50 of the wives and children in mid 1954. Each adult was presented with a gift and all children were given balloons. Alice (Aliki) Black (Mavromatis) responded with a speech of thanks while her daughter Poppy sang a few solos for the entertainment of all. But despite this laudable formal effort it wasn’t being sustained at a grass roots level. A lot of the wives were still finding assimilation difficult and painful into the late 1960s, despite their best efforts to interact with their new compatriots. Their slow mastery of English, making it hard to grasp Australian culture and adapt to the concept of a wider community, reinforced the feelings of isolation, loss and loneliness. The traditional close communal living and village customs associated with the Agora were gone forever, but how they should live the new way-of-life remained elusive. In the wider community they were met with some impatience with their inability to express themselves clearly in day-to-day encounters such as shopping and school meetings. All tried to master English in their own way and were upset when shop assistants reacted with rudeness rather than help. A lot also found it hurtful to be ignored at Parents and Citizens school meetings and functions when they tried to join the indigenes talking amongst themselves. A few suffered stress related illnesses.

Nevertheless, they were assimilating amongst themselves okay when the first of the combined Continental Balls was held in the Civic Hall a couple of months later. Over 450 people attended and raised a heap of money for the Mullumbimby Ambulance Service. It seems that ‘The Continental Club’ was formed about this time, but the makeup of its membership and where it met are mysteries. Anecdotally the language problem lead to a lot of unfortunate misunderstandings, but they couldn’t have been too great as the club was still going strong in the early 1960s. The combined Continental Balls evolved from The Continental Cabaret, a joint Greek-Italian affair held in the School of Arts 15Oct1953, and were probably modelled on the annual Italian Charity Balls, which became a popular fixture at the Riviera in Lismore from the 1930s.

Further evidence of assimilation was asserted by Mr Downer, Minister for Immigration, a stoutly pro-British politician, when he released statistics in mid 1958 which indicated Australian girls are becoming less ‘migrant husband conscious’ than they were early in the immigration programme  …showing much greater willingness among Australians now to accept migrants not only into the community but into the family. Of 50,930 marriages since 1950, in which bridegrooms were Europeans, 17,852 had married Australian….Between 30 and 40 percent of all European men marrying in Australia were now marrying ‘British’ said Mr Downer. In fact there was no increase; the percentage had remained consistent from similar figures released in 1953. Anecdotally Mullum was below this national average despite an increasing number of Mullum girls being unfazed by the still lingering social stigma associated with being seen rockin’ and rollin’ with southern Europeans. The statistics of early 1953 also showed migrant girls did not prefer Australian blokes; only 1 in 10 married outside the group. The nationalities which showed the least inclination to marry Australian blokes were the Poles and Greeks, of whom only 6% married Australians. The French of both sexes were the most enthusiastic to marry Australians, but there was no great swooning around Mullum and Murbah as un/fortunately these legendary seducers were as rare as truffles in the area.

Paradoxically, the restrictions imposed on Southern European migration in 1956 had led to an increase in the proportion of females arriving, in the so called ‘bride ships’, leading to a later reversion of this marriage trend. At the same time as he released these figures Mr Downer lifted restrictions on the entry of Southern European dependants, hence the ploy of ‘proxy brides’, but this new family reunion policy didn’t allow for an increase of the overall intake of this group. While maintaining the policy of maximum priority for British migrants, it was also a basic article that Australia should administer her immigration policy in a humane manner.

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Eat More Bananas

Early 1954 saw the worst cyclone in memory. Half of the 7300 acres of banana plantations in the Brunswick valley were destroyed, with Palmwoods and Upper Main Arm suffering the greatest loss. In monetary terms the losses to the Brunswick Valley growers were estimated from between £200,000 and £500,000, with overall losses on the Far North Coast in the vicinity of £2 million. It took 18mths to get the plantations up and running but huge landslides exposing deep clay subsoil meant a lot were irreclaimable. The cyclone was selective; 100 acres at Upper Main Arm, in Verdure Valley on the northern slopes, were completely untouched, giving these owners a nice return in the ensuing scarcity. Prices hit a peak of £5/16/- a case by midyear. For the first time ever Government money was forthcoming for rehabilitation, and shortly afterwards speculators entered the market and started driving up the price of banana land.

At this time the Brunswick Valley had again surpassed the Tweed in acreage to become the nation’s leading banana benders, prompting many warnings on over-production: Migrants and others attracted by the high prices received during the past two seasons are likely to plant on a large scale hoping to make quick fortunes.

A few months earlier wide publicity had been given to the findings of the Duranbah experimental station which determined that one man on his own could easily maintain 3 acres of bananas and pay himself a wage of £13 a week and have a profit of £1,575 in addition at the end of the year. This brought outcries from the BGF, ironically the organization which had funded the project and report: It could cause a rush to get into the industry, which could in turn bring a big market glut in 12 months time. The cyclone postponed the inevitable.

Early 1955 saw more attempts to curtail people jumping on the runaway banana wagon. Backyard growers with a couple of plants were outlawed on the grounds they made no efforts to control pests and risked spreading disease into the plantations. BGF muscle was responsible for State Legislation being introduced for penalties up to £50 for anyone found planting bananas in their backyards without a permit. Then there was a hue and cry over ‘Pitt Street farmers’ entering the game. The Billinudgel branch of the BGF fired off a quick resolution to the District Council ‘to call for the elimination from the industry of such persons as solicitors, doctors, dentists, accountants and others, including public servants and school teachers’, but those lawyers are a canny lot and weren’t to be put off a nice little earner.          

With new growers continuing to flood into the industry, coupled with an exceptionally good season and quicker recovery than expected from the 1954 cyclone, banana production started to reach glut proportions by early 1955 and continued unabated for two years, generating negative returns in a lot of cases and causing great hardship to many families. Prices peaked at 66/- in April but throughout the rest of 1955 the growers were only getting about £1 a case at times while production costs had risen to between 30/- and 35/- a case. The BGF proposed many solutions, but nothing practical to manage production or improve marketing and distribution eventuated.

In March 1955 the release of the new acreage figures showed the area under bananas in NSW had finally broken the 1948 record, with 30,144 acres under cultivation and 300 new growers having entered the industry in the past year. The Tweed had once again taken the lead with The Brunswick suffering a net loss. More ominously, The Brunswick’s share of the pie had fallen back to 25% as Coffs Harbour and Richmond continued to gain ground. In June the production figures were released showing the magic 2 million mark had been passed with 2,161,126 cases produced in the last 12mths.

The BGF faction which argued that market forces and acts-of-god should be left to regulate the industry was still in the ascendancy, while those advocating that boom and bust cycles could be smoothed out by controlling planting through Government regulation had all their proposals voted down. As ever, hope triumphed over reality.

Paradoxically, the lead and lag of these things saw a record number of school enrolments at the beginning of the year (1001 students, just under half of the total Mullum population), but in the last term 30 students withdrew from the High School, attributed entirely to a population drift from the district stemming directly from low banana prices. Mid year saw the peak in a mini building boom taking place in town at the same time as the number of houses for sale started to rise exponentially. The Council had also invested heavily in new plant, buildings and office equipment but when they tried to cover it all by raising rates at the end of the year found themselves with a ratepayers mutiny. They eventually hiked the rates in early 1956 by 11d in the £.

Mullum’s growth had been entirely due to the banana industry and the Chamber of Commerce viewed the glut with great concern. Like everyone else they had opinions on what should be done, but their gratuitous recommendations to the BGF weren’t well received. Any suggestion of regulation was countered with the great fear of Queensland production reaching NSW markets. The Chamber also got wind of the visit of a representative of the Dutch Government doing another survey of whether Australia offered the best prospects for their emigrants and promptly invited the Dutch Consul to town to point out the settlement opportunities around the Nightcap Range and Upper Main Arm.

At cross-purposes was the Mullum RSL, which was prompted for some odd reason, ostensibly because of a couple of Brisbane murders committed by a German migrant, to write to Mr Anthony seeking a tighter security check on migrants to prevent the undesirable type entering the country. Mr Anthony passed on the request to Mr Holt, Minister for Immigration, whose gratuitous reply was published in the Star Advocate in early 1956: Every possible check was kept on people selected for migration in order that only the best types were admitted to this country…. Along with this were figures published showing the migrant crime rate well below that of Australians. The RSL wasn’t satisfied and decided that its delegates at the next meeting of the FNC District Council should table all its correspondence dealing with the screening of migrants. There’s a little mystery here. Something about the New Australians got up their nose. The papers were still into political correctness so the story can’t be fleshed out. Coincidentally, a short time later something also prompted Mr T. H. Massey, Commonwealth Co-ordinator for the New Settlers Leagues, to come to town and give a pep talk to a gathering at the Council Chambers of Murbah and Mullum. He said it was a good thing for a country as small in population as Australia that so many migrants were coming. Few Australians realised that more than a million had arrived in the last seven years and that more than half of those were non-British, he said. That had helped to create in Australia history’s biggest population increase in modern civilization.

Meanwhile, as predicted by the non-interventionists, market forces eventually sorted out the glut problem without anyone having to lift a finger. Inevitably many destitute lessees walked away, with their abandoned patches causing a major menace to those who remained in the industry. Their patches quickly became infested with weeds giving the BGF’s bunchy top gangs a large extra workload in the destruction of these plantations.

The figures for the year to 31Mar56 show 811 acres abandoned in the Brunswick Valley and only 319 new acres taken up, with the number of registered growers now standing at 865, but the cumulative reduction over all banana growing regions in the State was only 1515 acres thus continuing the run of low returns, with State-wide productivity coming in at a record 2,858,038 cases for the 12mths to mid year. At the same time locally, fully producing five acre patches were still being advertised at give away prices of around £200. By mid 1957 they were up marginally with 4 acre patches advertised for £275. There was a further slight recovery in banana lease values but by mid 1958 it was on the slide again and a 9 acre lease, with 4 acres planted out, a packing shed, fully irrigated and with road frontage, could be picked up for £350. A month later this patch still hadn’t sold and the price was reduced to £300.  At the same time the Chamber of Commerce had become a paper tiger, barely getting a quorum at monthly meetings. It had suffered a substantial drop in membership and there was talk of disbanding.

The figures to 31Mar57 show the shakeout was ongoing with a further 181 growers abandoning the industry State-wide, while the number of registered growers on one acre or more in the Brunswick now stood at 791. Paradoxically, the net acreage reduction of 440 acres in the Brunswick Valley, bringing the total back to 6305 acres, was far less than the Tweed, making The Bruns growers once again the nation’s ruling banana benders. And another severe drought that year again cut supplies drastically, driving peak prices to record levels. Average returns were up around £2 a case by mid year and everyone was on the big dipper once again.

Despite the lower acreage however, improvements in cultivation techniques saw production return to around record levels quickly and in mid 1958, with figures published showing 2,341,795 cases produced in the past year, everyone went weak at the knees when a massive glut looked imminent, with warnings that production for the current year was heading towards a new record of over 3,000,000 cases. This despite gales mid year that were the worst since 1954 and created havoc in the plantations at Main Arm and Billinudgel.

By 31Mar60 the Bruns was down to 6016 acres while the State acreage was up to 29,944, just under the 1954/55 record, with the biggest jump at Coffs Harbour. Coffs was also the innovation leader, introducing aerial spraying of fertilizer, insecticide and fungicide in late 1958, and by late 1959 having about 650 four wheel drive vehicles operating on carefully laid out plantations, taking a lot of the hard labour out of banana growing and making flying foxes obsolete. NSW production for the 1959/60 season came in at a new record of 3,039,840 cases. That’s almost one billion bananas folks.

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Banana Marketing

In the meantime a few marketing initiatives had been taken. Despite many misgivings the BGF moved into retailing and opened three fruit stores in Sydney in early 1956 and shortly afterwards started a trial of a new marketing scheme with the agents in the Sydney markets. By mid 1956 their third hardware/homeware retail store, after those of Murwillumbah and Coffs Harbour, had opened in Mullum, along with the Council’s new Civic Centre buildings. The Brunswick Valley growers recommended to the board that Greek, Italian and English languages should be used in the campaign to encourage patronage of the new stores and increase share investments in the co-op, but it seems it wasn’t taken up. Nor was the suggestion to start publishing special articles in the ‘Banana Bulletin’ in Greek and Italian. This was an initiative of the Burringbar branch but a year later it became the obsession of Matteo Bortolussi of the Main Arm branch.

In late 1956 the BGF augmented their ‘Banana Bulletin’ by appointing a professional editor to expand the Bulletin into the official organ of the BGF. With a captive readership of 6500 growers, including veggie and other fruit growers, between The Tweed and Nambucca it had more readers than the average country town newspaper and gave the BGF the opportunity to extend its political clout. By 1960 with the banana industry in turmoil numbers had dropped to 4500, although it was also representing a lot more vegetable growers at this time.

By mid 1958 the industry was in a pretty bad way and the growers began agitating for more solutions to overcome progressively lower prices as overproduction increased. This time around they were exhorted not to fight amongst themselves but to actively seek unity to come up with workable solutions. So much so that Mr D Graham, president of the BVD Council, said at the annual meeting in August 1958 that The assimilation of New Australians was one of the most pressing problems confronting the banana industry. He said the problem was one which should be given much thought by growers in an effort to devise means of familiarising New Australians with the activities of the BGF organization.
He suggested two possible means of achieving that end: Holding of a social function each year in each district council at which New Australians could mix with other people of the industry; Appointment of a liaison officer by the board to tour the area and advise New Australian growers to speak their own views.
All will agree that unity must be built up amongst growers and, finally reversing the old line, that New Australians are just as important as the old in our industry.
Conversely, as in times past, he may have been trying to head off the inevitable search for scapegoats in hard economic times.

This may also have been the reason for the direction of Mr Anthony’s speech at a naturalization ceremony in mid 1959, at the height of this banana glut: There had been criticism regarding the number of immigrants entering the banana industry, but it must be remembered that they were only a small percentage of the immigrants coming to Australia. Most of them are not growing bananas. They are in the cities – eating bananas. And showing Australia was still living in fear of the yellow hordes he said Australia needed many more immigrants to build its population to a strength sufficient to ensure security against the growing millions of Far Eastern countries.

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Assimilation

Nevertheless, official efforts at social acceptance had been making steam since late 1956 when the first of the public naturalization ceremonies was held at the Mullum Council Chambers, with Matteo Bortolussi, an Italian of Main Arm, and Mike Meszaros, an Hungarian of Mullumbimby Creek, presented with certificates, Bibles and photos of the Queen. The Mayors of Mullum and the Byron Shire spoke on the need for more people of their type to build a strong nation, the Headmaster of Mullum High spoke on the cultural gain to Australia, Gino Pagura, President of the Good Neighbour Council, had a few words as did Fr. T O’Byrne and many others. Messages of welcome from the RSL and Rotary were read out to the large crowd overflowing the chambers.

The election of late 1957 saw 27yr old Doug Anthony succeed his late father, with a typical 50% winning margin, and one of his first duties was to present certificates at Byron Shire’s first public naturalization ceremony. A couple of months later saw him again at the Mullum council chambers presenting a naturalization certificate to Aphroditi Karavia and making a speech on the need for more migrants to make the country strong but that Australia wanted to avoid racial problems by adhering to the ‘White Australia’ policy. On the same day the first family sponsored to Mullum by the local RSL under the ‘Bring out a Briton’ scheme arrived in town. Doug was back again in mid 1958, before the largest crowd to date for a naturalization ceremony, and presented certificates to two more Italians. While Italian numbers seem to have been on a par with the Greeks by this stage, and with an increasing profile, the Greeks continued to monopolise ‘alien’ comment in the Star Advocate.

A little later the Consul-General for Denmark, Mr F. Hemming Hergel, was invited to open the 1958 Show, the first man from overseas to open a Mullumbimby Show, previously the prerogative of Messrs Stephens or Anthony. The Nelson family, well-known former Danish residents, donated a Danish flag to the Agricultural Society. A further sea change in 1958 was Mr Stephens’ invitation to His Excellency, Lieutenant General Mohammed Yousuf, High Commissioner for Pakistan in Australia and New Zealand, to open the Tweed Banana Festival, the chairman of which was the brother of Mr Doug Anthony MHR.

By this time too, the official name ‘New Australian’ had given way to the term ‘New Citizen’, at least in the Star. The ‘New Australians’ had never been overjoyed with the label, particularly as they often heard it uttered in a deprecating/derogatory sense by a large element of ‘Old Australia’, and usually with the suffix ‘bloody’. Unofficially, ‘bloody wog/dago/reffo/dps….’, could still be heard through the door of the public bar. With all these initiatives the impression is that gradually the New Thingies were fading into the woodwork. Except then along came a rise in unemployment across the country with the usual peak in the business cycle, causing some agitation for a cut in the immigration programme in early 1958.

At an official level nobody broke ranks and even Albert Monk, President of the ACTU and a member of the Immigration Advisory Board, continued to support the programme on the economist’s advice that an increasing population would kick-start demand and hence the economy in a short time. By early 1959 however, unemployment had reached 82,000 and the ACTU Interstate Executive was calling for a review of the migrant intake.

Politicians of all persuasions, including the Prime Minister, were on the hustings preaching that Australia must maintain its programme of 100,000 migrants per year, with Sir Earl Page pushing for a target population of 30 million by 1975-80. The Governor-General, Field Marshall Sir William Slim, was co-opted and wandered around the country saying we needed migrants to survive. Throughout it all they were well supported by editorials in the regional newspapers.

Mr. Townley, Minister for Immigration, was even talking about the unthinkable – an abolition of the dictation test. A couple of months later he was replaced by Mr Downer who did indeed introduce the necessary legislation because the test had been used to prevent the entry into Australia of Europeans as well as Asians…It’s clumsy, creaking operation had evoked much world resentment, and tarnished Australia’s good name, and therefore the Government had decided to abolish it with a system of entry permits.

At the same time Mr Anthony was delivering some homilies at a naturalization ceremony at Murbah where 27 ‘New Citizens’ were created, the largest mass baptism ceremony ever held on the north coast, and told the applicants they did not have to forget their own countries with their own precious heritages. But they would have to find new heroes among Australian pioneers to be true Australians. He referred to the White Australia policy which had been introduced 50 years ago by ‘wisemen’ to keep Asiatics out. Now Australia was glad to accept the anglo-saxon and latin European races from Europe who were ‘made of the same stuff as Australians’…. A little over 6mths later another record was set when Murbah gave birth to 44 New Citizens. Mr Anthony stayed away and the honour of passing out the bibles was given to Harold Lundberg, President of the Tweed Shire Council and a naturalized Swede who landed in 1923. And 8mths later, Nov59, another 33 were christened, making a total of 387 converts, originating from 32 different countries, delivered by the Murbah missionaries in the last three years.

The British-Australian Association was a touch paranoid that the Government reeked with deceit in giving preference to non-British migrants. The position was getting serious and Australia was fast going foreign with more than 90% alien immigration. They called for a Royal Commission. A few months later the World Director of the Inter-governmental Committee for European Migration advised the Australian Government that the Northern European migrant market was drying up fast because of improved economic conditions and that Australia may soon find itself in the position where Southern Europeans – Italians, Greeks and Spaniards – are the only Europeans available for migration in large numbers.

By late 1958 the ‘Bring out a Briton Scheme’ was floundering. The percentage of British migrants had fallen to 37%, despite the Federal Government target of at least 50%. A representative of the Immigration Department Office in Brisbane was invited to address a Northern Rivers Chamber of Commerce meeting at Tweed Heads and said the ‘Bring out a Briton’ scheme was not intended to supplant the plan to bring migrants from other countries, but was aimed at evening-up the percentage of British to non-British migrants to Australia. It was desirable to bring into the country people of the same stock as Australians to guarantee the maintenance of the British way of life in Australia. The scheme had been very successful for four years, but a falling off in the percentage to a dangerous level had caused the Government some concern. ...while …the average Australian apparently could not care less.

In mid 1959 Mr Downer toured Britain with new assisted passage incentives to attract English migrants and forecast that Australia would have a population of 30 million by the end of the century. At the same time Mr Anthony was baptising new citizens at a naturalization ceremony in Lismore and said Australia could accommodate 60 million without any depreciation in living standards… By the end of the year inflation was running away and lots of groups were calling for time out, including the AWU, which the New Citizen's Council, the Sydney based umbrella organisation for the New Settler's Leagues, branded anti-worker, anti-migrant, tyrannical, inhuman and oppressive.... and urged “older Australians who believe in a fair go” also to boycott the AWU “to defend their human rights.” Conversely, the Macedonians had 2yrs earlier voiced their concerns through the left-leaning MAPL that 'In Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney a great number of our migrants are without work, without homes, without help, but still the Government is continuing to bring migrants from various parts of Europe.... They resolved to work closely with the ACTU who are in open conflict with the Federal Government of Menzies... If we could stand solid and organised and help the side of the Australian workers who are fighting to gain better working conditions...and control on prices and guaranteed jobs to the unemployed and so liquidate unemployment... Menzies' credit squeeze of late 1960 increased unemployment around the country, resulting in his government barely scraping home in the 1961 election, with less than 50% of the two-party preferred vote.

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Mullumbimby’s Predicament

Mullum also was in a spot of bother over this period. Despite the pick-up in the banana industry by late 1957, Council was still suffering a chronic funding shortfall. For a considerable time they had been having difficulty finding a lender for the £10,000 needed to complete their various projects. A sign of the times was the saga of ‘Prince’, council’s sole remaining working horse. His companion of many years, ‘Captain’, had been sold earlier in the year and Prince had been left to work alone drawing the council mower. It was felt Prince was getting ‘soft’ and should be replaced by a motorised unit, but the shire clerk pointed out they couldn’t afford to do so:  Mr Bourne said it would cost £1100 to £1200 – and the trade-in value of Prince would be small. Seems like poor old Prince was destined for the glue factory, but with a feed bill of only £1/10/- per week he was still pulling his weight at this time. He was already 15yrs old in late 1953 when he had been picked up for a bargain from the Tweed Shire, which had decided to go completely mechanical - and in offloading Prince resolved that the least we can do is see that Prince spends the rest of his days in a good home, which turned out to be the workhouse at Mullum.

Nor could they afford £1000 for a septic system for the Civic Centre, Mullum’s main venue for the holding of big functions where overflowing dunnies were a major embarrassment and the cause of many complaints. The agitation from the High School was worse. With nearly 500 students in 1958, and an anticipated increase of 60 from the primary schools in 1959, the council had to promise faithfully that they would be the first cart off the ranks with a septic system in 1959 if the Government subsidy came good. It never did. In May1959 the Minister for Public Works gave a politician’s promise that work on a sewage scheme for Mullum may start within the next 2½ years. It was finally completed in 1966, 11yrs after Murbah and 14yrs after Kyogle had theirs up and flushing.

Nevertheless, the release of new Mullum valuations in late 1957, showing an average increase of 18% over 1953, pulled them out of the hole in early 1958 with an increase in revenue from rates. Interestingly, the valuations in Dalley Street, both improved and unimproved, had surpassed Burringbar Street. East Mullum, over the railway line, continued to be the most highly valued residential area, but Main Arm Road, now home to a host of migrants who had moved into town, had shown the biggest jump.

Byron Shire was in a different predicament with their valuations showing a decrease in the rural areas and giving a projected revenue loss of £21,900 for 1958. Byron Bay and Brunswick Heads, where valuations had gone up, were beginning to fill up with retirees on tight budgets and any increase in rates was a great burden. The council battled on with Government subsidies but by the end of the year was forced to increase rates, which nevertheless still left a deficit.

The Byron Shire was experiencing an unemployment problem with the multiplier effect of the prolonged Zircon Rutile Ltd shut down following a major fire. The number of registered unemployed reached 163 by early 1958, giving a pool of workers for the banana growers and hastening the return to overproduction. [Conversely, further up the coast at Cudgen the collapse of the sand mining industry saw about 1000 men progressively laid off, giving a surplus of cutters for the sugar cane plantations, previously a supplementary source of income for the Crabbes Creek banana growers. Nevertheless, in the 12mths to 31Dec58 the sand miners of the Byron and Tweed still contributed a combined £430,000 to the spending money in the shires through their wages bill and produced minerals to the value of £1,380,000.] The Byron Council, like Mullum Municipality, had no spare funds for relief work and was making pleas for Government money to support schemes reminiscent of the Great Depression. (And started pushing for an early start on the Belongil Harbour Scheme, to house up to 70 fishing boats.) One councillor commented that the ‘dole’ of £4 a week was breeding ‘loafers’ and that the far more expensive Government ‘make-work schemes’ were a better proposition. The same bloke, in voting against the mid 1959 proposal to waive rates for pensioners and accept a 50% govt subsidy in lieu, said ‘If we offer this concession we will have half the pensioners on the north coast down here’.

The giant development at Golden Beach, started in early 1958 for a projected city of 20,000, was dead in the water by the end of the year. Many local investors got their fingers burnt, as did the Council when the personal guarantees of the directors proved to be worthless - that they should have sought an insurance bond was retrospective wisdom. The board of directors of this Melbourne company was reconstituted in late 1959 and the more modest South Golden Beach development completed to get some of the money back. The first lots came on the market in early 1960 priced from £295 to £850, but by the end of the year few had been sold. They could do you a nice two bedroom house and land package from £2900 - at the same time as you could pick up a 10acre freehold banana plantation with a modern home for £2000. Then the 'credit squeeze' of late 1960 compounded their problems.

Mullum’s survival as an independent municipality was a close run thing. Almost 90% of its revenue came from its ‘Electrical Undertaking’, an initiative taken way back in 1925 with the Laverty’s Gap Hydro power station. By 1957 it had connected all the villages and hamlets and 9% of rural consumers in the Shire, generating an annual gross income of £225,000, but still propped up by Government subsidy. To manage it all the Municipality had evolved as a corporate entity, with the Chief Engineer seeming to wield more power than the Town Clerk, and most council meetings were taken up with discussion of electricity rather than the typical council business of services to rate payers. Its new civic buildings were designed specifically to function along business lines and it’s electrical retailing shop-front at the chambers became a bone of contention with the other retailers in town.

The State Electricity Authority saw the Undertaking as inefficient and wanted it absorbed into the NRCC, a case which it argued before a Government appointed Commissioner in early 1958. Their argument was persuasive; amongst other things mentioning that 65% of the Undertaking’s electricity was purchased from the NRCC anyway and that the remaining 35% was generated by expensive diesel units (the hydro water supply dam gave priority to serving the town water requirements). Nevertheless, the Commissioner was duly swayed by the big gun witnesses, in the form of Mr Stephens MLA and others, and the smooth talking QC hired by the council, that the social disruption and the financial remuneration would be too high at this stage. However, his report recommended that Byron and Mullum should seek a union as soon as possible because of the inevitability of loss of the Undertaking. What might have been had the decision gone the other way or Mullum accepted the marriage proposal at that time rather than be dragged screaming to the altar 20yrs later? In 1946 the betrothal of the Murwillumbah Municipal Council and the Tweed Shire Council had demonstrated that mixed marriages worked, albeit with a few sparks now and again. Living next door to each other in Murbah made it easier to legitimise their defacto relationship.

Mullum wasn’t viable without the Undertaking and small inland towns were proving they couldn’t survive in the long term; witness Bangalow. Ironically, it was poverty that preserved Bangalow and now makes it such an attractive place for new settlers - and currently the fastest growing town on the north coast according to the real estate agents. Mullum continued to seek ‘progress’ and ‘modernisation’, with the last of the town’s decorative verandah/awning posts removed from the Middle Pub in early 1958, but returning the charm in a makeover 40yrs later.

Byron Shire building applications dropped sharply in 1958, down 30% on the 170 received in 1957, and a further 50 dairy farms went out of business. By early 1959 the position of the council’s finances was going from bad to worse said Cr Reid at a Byron council meeting which decided to retrench four more works staff upon the completion of the last of the Department of Main Roads contracts.

There was some relief in 1960 when the start of the £240,000 Harbour Scheme at Bruns brought equipment, workers and families from Bermagui to rejuvenate the local economy. At the same time Council got a grant to refurbish the temporary road bridge across South Arm to the surf at Bruns and another injection of Government money for road maintenance. The Shire President, Cr Giles, in his yearly review lamented that development generally had not been as great as had been hoped, although with 32 new houses it at least kept on a par with 1959 (31), discounting the continuing erection of a variety of dwellings on leaseholds without Development Consent, a shire tradition maintained by the following communal hippsters snapping up farms at give away prices.

Over this period Murbah and the Tweed District seemed to be defying the Brunswick Valley trend. At the beginning of 1959 the Daily News was congratulating the citizens on a past year of spectacular progress, with Murbah’s Main Street undergoing its greatest building programme for many years and only 34 recalcitrant business houses yet to ‘modernise’ and remove their decorative awning posts, the single biggest factor in changing the look of all regional towns (except Bangalow). Murbah and Tweed Heads business houses had a record Christmas shopping spree and the seaside resorts of Fingal, Kingscliff, Cudgen and Hastings Point experienced bumper crowds. Record enrolments at the Murbah schools, Doug Anthony’s easy win in the elections and the comforting Mr Menzies’ return with a record 32 seat majority (albeit with the help of preferences from the DLP, which won more votes than the Country Party), the completion of the film ‘The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll’ with Tweed background scenery, the most successful Banana Festival ever (which saw 15,000 people dancing in the streets), optimism of a turn around in the dairy industry with the start of rationalisation/restructuring, and many home town sport successes, left everyone with a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling and faith in the future. The dairymen were celebrating their best season for many years and, at the expense of Mullum, a rising rate of butter production from the local factories, coupled with a rise in the price of butter. The CSR mill at Condong had had a record crush bringing in over one million quid, while over at the border the relocation of the tick gates was a metaphor for prompting Tweed/Coolangatta into a new era of cooperation and progress and a heap of new subdivisions. The downturn in the sandmining industry was viewed with some concern as the rutile price continued to fall, but low prices in the banana industry were only seen as a temporary aberration at this time. It was a different story in Mullum, which was almost totally dependent on a diet of bananas, but Murbah soon joined the worry club. On 7Jan60 the frightening Daily News headlined article ‘Banana Output Tops Three Million Cases For First Time’ finished off with ‘EAT MORE BANANAS!’  In 1958-60 the average land value of Murbah CBD lots was £10,634. By 1965-67, just before the devastating rural recession, it had fallen to £10,134. And the new State of 'New England', the Country Party's obsession for over 40yrs, got the thumbs up from the locals at the referendum in Apr67, a majority in the Byron electorate agreeing with the Daily News, Chamber of Commerce, Stephens MLA and Anthony MHR that they should wave goodbye to NSW.

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The Beginning of the End

By late 1958 banana returns were well and truly on the wane and the Mullumbimby Branch of the BVD, at the instigation of Andrew Alidenes, began agitating for another review of the ‘merchant scheme’. The scheme never had unanimous support and the previous year Richmond dissented when the district councils agreed to recommend to the Minister that the initial 12mth trial be extended. However, at the same time the Minister received their submission he already had on his desk a petition from growers in the Richmond and Brunswick River districts in which 452 growers, representing 9.6 percent of commercial growers in the industry and controlling 15 percent of the total acreage of bananas in the State, requesting that the merchant scheme be abandoned and that there be a reversion to the agency system. The rats in the ranks were never identified or whether this clique of growers was a member of the BGF. A perennial problem for the BGF was that a lot of growers were never members, some even forming their own competing cooperatives. Like good unionists they had been trying since the early 1940s to have membership of the BGF made compulsory for all growers so that action by the industry in a case of a glut could be successful, with the whole body of growers acting as one entity. As a result of this failure the banana industry never spoke with one voice, giving the Minister some tricky problems when others purported to represent the industry. The BGF never resolved this problem and at times was a touch paranoid over the disruptive tactics of other organizations. Nevertheless, in this case the Minister eventually approved the extension for a further twelve months, and after a vote by all growers in mid 1958 had the price fixing scheme, or a variation of the original, approved by an Act of Parliament.

Prices were supposed to have been fixed by the agreement but returns to growers were all over the place by late 1958. The growers considered themselves conned in voting for the scheme when it was revealed that their belief, that the agreement provided an iron clad guarantee that prices would never fall below £1 per case, proved to be only a fine print clause to try and maintain this floor price. Even so, the fact that the same case that saw the grower receiving a gross return of £1 returned the retailers £6 was a cause of aggravation. As the price fell to 18/-, then 16/-, they were after BGF blood. At the same time the BGF’s banana retailing businesses in Sydney were running at a loss, as was the BGF’s Burringbar store, now only open on a part time basis. A minor irritant was the new award won by the AWU giving the BGF’s bunchy top gangs another bonus of 20/- to 50/- above the basic wage, annoying the growers, their employers on less income. At this time there were only two teams of four men each left in the Brunswick Valley, while Richmond and Tweed still retained four teams of four men each.

Their agitation couldn’t move the BGF board to disclose the full nature of the retailing debacle, but it transpired that one Sydney shop was still operating, albeit at a loss. The BGF board had been caught napping while competition from the new chain stores grew beyond any hope of accommodation. Ironically, the chain stores’ method of marketing, by disposing of large quantities of bananas, was exactly what the BGF had tried to do. Mullum branch continued to sniff around on the BGF’s retail venture and confronted the BGF directors on the Bruns District Council with the rumour that losses had reached £78,000, but no hard figures were ever presented.

At the same time the agents were attempting to break the ‘merchant agreement’ by increasing their commission by 10%. The growers, who were already getting 5/- per case less than the ‘fair average fixed price’, were mutinous, and were taking out their anger, perhaps unfairly, on the BGF. The Mullum branch, showing its distrust of both the BGF and the agents, wanted to send its own grower delegates to Sydney to oversee the meetings of the price fixing committee. In the end the BGF managed to quiet everyone down by getting the Government to set up yet another public inquiry into commissions. What a bag of worms. So much for Mr Graham’s call for unity.

Even the good name of Anthony, which had just helped Doug romp home with 70% of the Richmond vote (Mullum 75%), was invoked, but he had his arms full with the dairy industry, which was in the process of rationalising and leaving marginal farmers in deep trouble. Norco had just purchased all of Foley Bros Richmond and Tweed interests and closed the Mullum butter factory, leaving 100 suppliers stranded. In the Main Arm Valley, with 45 remaining dairy farms spread over 7734 acres, the farmers were particularly disturbed, as at the same time their supplementary income from banana rents looked like contracting. Most banana growers were lessees, and some farmers had over a dozen leases on their properties, generating a fair income from rent. The Mullum branch of the once mighty Primary Produces Union was down to 8 regular members attending meetings by early 1958 and there was talk of disbanding at that stage. Doug Anthony had opened the Bangalow Show in late 1957 and in his address said small dairies were barely returning the basic wage for a 40hr week…the average capital invested in dairy farms, usually run by the elderly, was £5000…there was insufficient income to keep their children on the land. By mid 1958 average farm incomes were down 32% on those of 1953. The number of registered dairy farms in the Byron Shire had declined slowly until 1954, when numbers stood at 750, but thereafter a consistent average of 50 per year went out of business. By late 1960 there were 460 registered dairies with a reported 80 still struggling without registration. Over the years a bone of contention between the growers and farmers was the matter of road and bridge maintenance and construction. The growers in the various districts contributed to a fund via a case levy, but the farmers never contributed a penny. By the early 1950s however, the growers saw the impossibility of getting blood out of a stone and stopped pressing them.

The dairy farmers were getting no sympathy in the Tweed district where the District Council of the BGF voiced their concern in mid 1958 that the number of dissatisfied dairy-farmers turning to the banana industry and small crop growing is a threat to banana and vegetable markets. Mr Boyd said the next three years could be the worst for North Coast farmers since the depression of 1931, 32 and 33. He said the dairying industry had declined from a flourishing industry to a poverty-stricken one…. “It happened in the depression years and will happen again when new growers come into the banana industry which already has a potential of four million cases a year.”  Mr Boyd said that New Australians growing vegetables near Sydney under ‘forced labour’ conditions also were having a damaging effect on the vegetable industry….

In early 1959 the continuing glut saw bananas touch a heart stopping 8/- a case, when harvesting costs alone were 18/- a case. [Costs were escalating due to the appearance of new diseases in the plantations, necessitating constant vigilance and regular spraying with an assortment of new chemicals.] Once again desperation saw all sorts of crackpot schemes being proposed. The Mullum Creek branch proposed a fund to buy back their own bananas to stabilise the market while the Crabbes Creek branch opted for a self-regulated quota system. Both branches however, also supported Government action to limit acreage, but this still came to nothing for fear QLD wouldn’t come to the party. It took months of arguing but in the end 6 of the 9 Brunswick Valley District branches voted for the quota system in mid 1959, but without unanimous agreement and an effective policing scheme this would have left the Greek God Chaos running the show. A short time later the release of the 1958/59 NSW banana production figures, at 3.5 million bushels, just under the 1955/56 record, had everyone reaching for the smelling salts.

The Tweed District Council advised that many growers were getting debit accounts from agents instead of cheques because sale prices were below the costs of marketing. They were so concerned that they decided to include the whole community by calling a public meeting, at which George Varela advised that he couldn’t sell bananas from his fruit shop and had begun giving bunches away for free – a very ‘un-Greek’ thing to do! The huge loss to banana growers throughout the Tweed had been most noticeable to businessmen throughout the district, as the banana growers, even though receiving no returns from their plantations, were not eligible for any Government assistance, unemployment benefit or the like. The public meeting, drawing over 100 people and including many Brunswick growers, could only come up with the Quota System, which nevertheless only got up with a vote of 38 to 11 with over 50 abstaining. A committee of six then went about the banana growing districts of the State trying to get unanimous agreement, but had no luck. The meeting also considered the gimmick of free distribution of bananas to schools as the dairy industry had done with milk.

The BGF tried a new grower calming device by appealing to academic authority when, in late 1959, it threw money at the Professor of Agricultural Economics at UNE to hire a senior graduate to complete research into all problems associated with those recalcitrant twins, marketing and distribution. It will bring a fresh mind to bear on the subject and strengthen the industry’s approaches to Government on marketing matters by the possession of factual information and detailed analysis of marketing problems…rah rah rah, but as usual the expenditure turned out to be just as effective as a bumper sticker solution, ‘Eat more bananas ya boofheads’. In late 1960, at a cost of £3,000, the BGF commissioned a Sydney based bunch of business consultants to come up with a report. This decision was presented at the end of the year at the BGF AGM held at Mullum, the first in 8yrs, and had a mixed reaction. Gino Pagura, the first migrant onto the board of directors in 1959, caused apoplexy when he got to his feet and claimed that the banana industry in Australia had been the most backward in the world.

Nor did the intercession of Archbishop Ezekiel Tsaucalas sway the bloke upstairs. The Archbishop, newly enthroned as the administrator of the Greek Orthodox Church of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, arrived in the area accompanied by Fr Gregory of Brisbane in early September 1959 scouting out a location for a Greek Orthodox Church. There were 50 Greek families in the Mullumbimby community at this time, according to the Mayor in his welcoming speech, all of whom are good citizens he reckoned, with numbers and virtuousness much the same in the Lismore and Murwillumbah districts.

All three communities had been lobbying for sometime to have an official north coast parish proclaimed, with Murbah pushing to be the site for a church, but the Mullum Greeks must have suffered a collective rush of blood to the head as they took the opportunity of the Archbishop’s visit to form the Greek Orthodox Brotherhood of the Northern Rivers, with Theo Economos as president, Archie Caponas as secretary and Nick Alidenes, Toto Livanis and Tony Peters as committeemen. How this coup went over with the Greeks of the Richmond and Tweed has never been recorded. The subsequent collapse of the banana industry and the departure of many families saw it all come to nothing, but at this time it was reckoned that the north coast had the strongest Greek community in NSW outside Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. A resident priest was eventually installed in Lismore in 1963, but by 1968 the practice was discontinued. It’s compelling to muse on how things might’ve turned out if, if, if…..

The Archbishop was given a civic reception in the council chambers at which representatives of all the local churches, organizations and members of both the Australian and Greek communities attended. …Mullumbimby Council Chambers was packed to the doors and very many listened to the welcome from the hallway and in front of the entrance to the building…. Theo Economos of Mullum Creek was the main spokesman for the Greeks by this time, having received the baton in the long marathon that started with Caponas and passed through the hands of Vlismas, Alidenes and Peters.

A year earlier Archbishop Athenagoras, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Central Europe, visited the region, but for some reason bypassed Mullum in favour of the hospitality in Lismore and Murbah. Whilst in Australia he had accepted the invitation of the charming Very Reverend Archimandrite Boyazoglue, the Greek Orthodox Minister for Southern Queensland and Northern NSW, to tour his parish, receiving official welcomes in a number of towns.

The clergy were still at it in late 1959 when Fr O’Byrne, no doubt a mate of Bob Santamaria, gave an address at a naturalization ceremony without consulting the speechwriters of the BGF, saying The immigration authorities of Australia were making a mistake by ‘dumping’ the majority of migrants into large cities… He suggested the introduction of a land settlement scheme for migrants under which they could be placed on vast stretches of productive, but as yet uncultivated land in Australia. Earlier the Tweed District Council of the BGF had been moved to say that Italians and other Europeans were producing quality vegetable crops from soil which most Australians would consider not worth cultivating, but that the increasing quantity of this production was having a depressing effect on the market.

By the close of 1959 the banana situation was even more desperate and the crazy solutions kept on coming, all much the same as those proposed back in 1948. [Crabbes Creek branch urged the BGF board to approach the State Government to restore fruit barrowboys to the streets of Sydney. Main Arm branch wanted the board to buy up excess bananas for free distribution to orphanages, hospitals and aged care homes around the State.] The NSW 1959/60 banana production figures show an all time peak of 4.211 million bushels, but by the time of their release in early 1960 most growers were already letting their fruit rot on the plantation floor. Coffs Harbour District alone had produced half a million cases in the four months around Christmas 1959, a record never before approached by any district in NSW. Queensland production was also making inroads into southern markets, with over 120,000 cases finding their way down to add to the NSW total over this period 

In May60 a front-page article in the Star Advocate headlined ‘Forecast of Tragedy for Banana Industry’, had Mr Gardner, President of the BVD Council, saying that unless something was done shortly to relieve the position of banana growers conditions in the industry could become tragic. …  unless the banana industry was made more profitable for growers we would have dead towns which had been built up around the industry. He said the effect could be gauged by the fact that it had been estimated that 70% of the spending money at Mullumbimby came from bananas. Mr Gardiner forecast an even worse period for growers in the spring of this year… and… said the cause of the trouble in the industry could be summarized in one weakness – greater efficiency. He said the man who produced 1000 cases a year a few years ago was now producing 2000.

‘Considering the desperate position of the industry’, the question of a Government subsidiary for growers who had been in the industry for more than five years or more was once again proposed – a proposal laughed out of court when first put up by Andrew Alidenes in 1955. In the end they went for another Pontius Pilot solution by approaching the Minister for Agriculture, through Mr Stephens MLA, to have yet another independent committee set up ‘to endeavour to stabilize the industry’. It came to nothing.

The 25^th anniversary of the Brunswick Valley District Council was held in June 1960 attended by Mr Anthony, Mr Stephens, et al. While lots of fine words were spoken, Mr Sam Knight, Chairman of the Richmond District Council, put a dampener on the evening by pointing out that the District Council had passed through unfavourable periods when it had been claimed growers lost 5/- on every case produced…but with the year’s production at a record high he forecast a period when the loss might be even greater. He went on to say that while the BGF had brought progress in the production of bananas, if it was still going to progress it must also progress in distribution and marketing. The Brunswick Valley had been the only BGF district to come to the party in acreage reduction, but improved production techniques saw it all negated. At this time the Bruns had fallen from its influential position on the pedestal, having just 20% of the State’s total acreage and way behind, in order, Coffs, Richmond and the Tweed.

A BVD Council meeting in August 1960 unanimously agreed that ‘It’s time now for a last resort’. And was it ever. Succeeding months saw the same old solutions, with new twists, trotted out, but the BVD Council never got unanimous agreement on any of them. And even the BGF’s weapon-of-last-resort was fired. In desperation the Directors finally overcame their fear of QLD production flooding into NSW when they wrote to the Minister for Agriculture requesting legislation for control of planting. But it was too late and got the bum’s rush from the minister. Meanwhile his Department was being unsympathetic and continuing to prosecute growers not looking after their patches. One bloke before the Mullum court in Aug60 pleaded …that the banana industry had fallen about three years ago. After he had gone through all his resources, he had found it impossible to look after 30 acres of bananas. He now had 14 acres, but even that was difficult to look after.

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The End

By 1961 Mullum was starting to fall apart. The population now stood at 1,966, a decline of 3% on 1954 when it was the fastest growing town on the north coast. While the whole region was living in interesting times this figure placed it at the bottom of the heap, where it remained for the next 15yrs.

The number of permanent New Australians had risen significantly by the late 1950s, but their tendency to congregate together gave a misleading impression of their total presence. The hard core of stayers still only made up a small percentage of the district’s population although comprising almost 25% of the Mullum district banana growers. In the northern strip adjoining the Mullum district however, covering Crabbes Creek, Mooball and Burringbar, they made up about 18% of the population and 45% of the banana growers. Nevertheless, apart from this core of well-established families, the New Australian society was not a stable one and many itinerants were coming and going constantly, both families and single banana labourers, maintaining a large ‘alien presence’ in Mullum but making it hard to gauge a population percentage. In particular, the Ithacans were continually on the move through Newcastle and Brisbane while the Macedonians mainly rotated through their large Canberra/Queanbeyan enclave.

Greek migration continued apace and between 1961 and 1966 numbers in Australia almost doubled, but 1960 marked their peak settlement in Mullumbimby and the start of the exodus of a lot of the long-term families from the district. The good burghers of Mullum may have sensed something disquieting as mid year saw the Apex Club holding a special dinner to praise the part immigrants were playing in Mullum’s community life. Italy was represented by Matthew Bortolussi, India by Satman Singh, Finland by Bill Hager, Holland by Gerald Jansen, Macedonia by George Kotrones and Greece by both Theo Economos and John Develengas. A couple of months later saw the newly formed Quota Club celebrating United Nations Week by entertaining Archie Caponas as the token Greek and Lorenzo Benedet as the token Italian at a soiree at Bruns. The guests were entertained with television. But it was too late for Arch. He already had his house on the market - although the collapse of the Mullum real estate market saw him postpone his departure.

Bananas continued to be the lifeblood of the district but except for windows-of-opportunity average net returns never reached the pre 1955 levels and growers progressively abandoned the industry. Mullum’s long-term prosperity looked dodgy and despite many schemes proposed by the Chamber of Commerce and other bodies over the years there was no diversification into alternate industries as a buffer in countercyclical times. This phenomenon was a repeat of the post WW1 boom and bust, when Mullum lead the region in both the initial growth and subsequent stagnation.

By the early 1970s Mullumbimby was a basket case, the banana and dairy industries had collapsed and the last of the sawmills had shut down. Those who had the wherewithal to hang in there, and with a long term perspective and faith in the future, would have seen prosperity begin to return with the landing at Main Arm of a new wave of undesirable aliens called, amongst a range of flattering psychedelic labels, hippies, dropouts, dole bludgers, potheads, anarchists, alternates, econuts, vegans, tree huggers, new agers, ...., who, shudder, brought police surveillance helicopters. These communally inclined hippsters picked up dairy farms at bargain prices and returned profitability to the rural sector through the reintroduction of an old herb, while the white shoe brigade showed enterprise in farm subdivision and the growing of brickus veneerus. The cultural clash with Mullum’s concerned residents was on a par with their adjustment to the ‘New Australians.’ Most passed dictation tests, ‘hey man, that’s heavy’, but they refused to be assimilated so the intervention of Rotary and the resurrection of the New Settler’s League weren’t attempted. However, as before, the district eventually recovered from the shock and has since moved on, and what was alternate is now almost passé, although the ‘Rat People’ proved to be too colourful and had to be guided to the town limits in the early 1990s, and a few true-blue Aged of Aquarius continue to frighten the horses.

On the other hand the region missed out on the colour and flavour of Asian migration added to the blending pot (or salad bowl by then). From the 1980s the Greeks and Italians began to lose their dominant position on the menu with the rise and rise of exotic dishes from China, Vietnam, India, Lebanon, the Philippines, .... These spicy species mainly caused indigestion in Sydney. Nevertheless, despite current aberrations Australia generally has developed a healthy constitution and the dyspepsia will settle down.

Today Mullum is struggling out of its identity crisis with the help and hindrance of a colourful mix of many cultural and language groups having diverse interests, political persuasions and herbal remedies, and providing the doomsayers with a veritable smorgasbord of culprits to blame for the end of civilisation. The Bay, now Byron, has found its direction and is going upmarket, while Bangalow is filling up with seekers of serenity. The Heads, now Bruns, is marking time, while its newish neighbour, Ocean Shores, is on guard to hose down those who go over the top. Main Arm continues to evolve and mutate and retains a wellspring potential from which new social groupings can emerge. Be alert but not alarmed.

There were a couple of windows-of-opportunity for those who decided to hang on and live a subsistence lifestyle in their packing sheds. In about the mid 1960s there was a conjunction of forces that saw bananas touch about £7 a case and around the early 1970s with cyclones up and down the coast those whose patches survived made a killing, but for those whose patches were destroyed it was the last straw. Both lots in the survivor category then had the wherewithal to buy houses in the depressed Mullum market.

Northern NSW and South East Queensland continued to be the country’s major banana players into the late 1970s, but today (2001) the Tully region of North Queensland generates about two thirds of the three hundred million dollar industry. While about 1000 growers remain in the game in Northern NSW only a few diehards in the Brunswick Valley are still playing. Ironically, the old 5 and 15 acre patches the growers walked away from, now freehold on the best slopes with the best views, albeit without topsoil and overrun with camphors and lantana, are much sort after by non or hobby farmers and going for heaps. Mullum, now home to the Byron Shire Headquarters and over 3000 people, also has a veneer of prosperity and is experiencing a rate of capital growth amongst the highest in the country through marketing the ‘alternate lifestyle’. Tourism is now the shire’s biggest money-spinner, bringing in ~$300M per year while agriculture runs a poor second with $50M (discounting marijuana - and don’t mention the social welfare industry). On the Tweed, agriculture accounts for just 5.5% of the Shire's economy and sugar is again the leading crop. Who woulda thunk it.

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Afterthought

Australia’s first export of bananas to Greece, one container load of 720 cartons, was unloaded at Piraeus on 20Mar1998. They were North Coast bananas consigned by the BGF and arrived in perfect condition after seven weeks at sea. They were such a hit that the General Manager returned with an immediate order for 20 more container loads, 2300yrs after Alexander the Great had discovered the things in India.

Of the 50 or so Greek families in the Mullum district in the heyday of the banana industry, the phenomenon of chain migration saw the majority come from a single village on Ithaca, a small island less than one fifth the size of the Byron Shire and with a total population less than Mullums’. Perahori, the old island capital in pirate times and still the largest prewar village, declined quickly with postwar migration before stabilizing at its present 250. Most left in equal numbers for Australia and America, with smaller groups settling in Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, but Mullumbimby, a remote and insignificant town in the worldwide scheme of things, possibly became the single largest enclave of the village’s expatriates.

That one of the larger enclaves of post war Greeks and Macedonians in rural NSW happened to form around the conservative towns of Mullumbimby and Murwillumbah was an interesting historical accident. Assimilation was the catch cry of the period and this transcriber’s impression is that they were easily absorbed into the indigene culture and left no traces for future social researchers or tourists. Conversely, ‘multiculturalism’ has been given a new twist with the continuing settlement of the various varieties of homegrown ‘Alternate Lifestylers’ having a far greater impact and giving the region an illusory reputation of cultural diversity. The Richmond-Tweed still has less than half the State average of foreign-born residents (11% v. 23% in 2001), but it’s asserted that ‘The Rainbow Region’, inclusive of Nimbin and Mullum (or Sodom and Gomorrah still say the unkind), is now one of the most culturally diverse regions in NSW, implying that aliens, as originally defined, still aren’t one of the engines of social evolution, or remain only a minor cog in the gearbox.

Many Greeks, in their desire to blend in, helped preserve 'old Australia', some still using the language of bonzer blokes and sheilas. They never ‘transplanted the Agora’ (thank you Yiannis Dimitreas) and their impact on this region’s way-of-life was negligible, with their Australian-born descendants now as ‘alternate’ or ‘mainstream’ as the next white indigene.

[Psst. Some mischievous sociologists, probably lefty academics having a lend, reckon that the relative ethnic homogeneity of north coast towns is what’s attracting most of the battalions making up the coalition of white Anglo-Australian retirees/escapees/refugees invading from Sydney and inland. Couldn’t possibly be true, could it?]

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