Introduction to Symbols of Australia
by Mimmo Cozzolino
Behind the label
Introduction to Symbols of Australia
by Geoffrey Blainey
Beneath the lino
Introduction to Symbols of Australia
by Phillip Adams
Notes on the Text:
Mimmo Cozzolino, G Fysh Rutherford
Mimmo's dinkum memory-jogger
Review of Symbols of Australia
by Helen Garner,
The National Times,
October 12 to 18, 1980.
INTRODUCTION
by Mimmo Cozzolino
from Symbols of Australia,pg 9
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Trademarks are a symbol of a culture. They are a country's distilled history. The marks in this book were selected to show, among other things, the more obvious symbols of Australia over one hundred years.
What, for me, started out to be a fairly straightforward design project, turned into an historical revelation. The discovery was a very personal experience. It was also an affirmation of a set of symbols which, as a migrant, I had slowly built up as representing intrinsic Australia - some profound, others less so, but all of them initially foreign to someone coming from a different culture.
They say that converts speak the loudest. As a convert to Australia, I, subconsciously perhaps, felt a need to demonstrate to myself and to others that I was assimilating well into my new culture. Through trademarks, I had found a simple way to prove it.
To my generation, migrant or native, the same search for affirmation of who we are and where we are going as a nation, has been visibly occurring since the early seventies, when the spell of the Menzies Era was broken by Whitlam. Even migrants received a new deal: they did not have to assimilate anymore; they could now quietly integrate!
As well as being a source of reference, of visual delights, and, to my generation, a record of quaint slices of life from the past, I hope that the symbols in this book may also, by linking us with this past, give us confidence in our search for independence, and faith to determine our own future.
Mimmo Cozzolino
Melbourne June 1980
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BEHIND THE LABEL
by Geoffrey Blainey.
From Symbols of Australia,pg 11, 12
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A lost Australia has been found in the last fifteen or twenty years. Folk songs and slang, old buildings, bottles and bedsteads, old Australian paintings and films and books have been appreciated afresh. And in this book Mimmo Cozzolino shows us, for the first time, how Australian trademarks were a mirror of people's dreams, ambitions, and daily life.
Just as the Commonwealth designed its own coat of arms and flag, so thousands of firms designed their own slogans and symbols - in short their trademarks. The rise of the trademark was mainly the result of the industrial revolution and the widening range of products made in factories. Trademarks were also multiplied by a change which has barely reached the history books - the packaging revolution. Whereas in 1850 many households in Australia made soap, candles, clothes, medicines, jam, bread and butter in their own kitchen, in 1900 the factories increasingly made these goods, selling them under distinctive brands and trademarks. In 1850 a general store sold most of its goods straight from the packing cases, vats, chests and barrels and then transferred them to the customers' baskets, bags, containers and billies, but more and more goods in 1900 were sold in individual bottles, tins, jars and other labelled containers.
As the standard of living increased, people could afford to buy a wider variety of products. Bicycles and sewing machines and other innovations entered the market: being almost identical they needed a trademark to show that they were not. Literacy increased, and advertising became an industry. In the era before radio and film, the printed word and the painted picture dominated advertising; and the typical trademark combined the two.
Trademarks were not widely used until the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1862 an English law made the fraudulent forging of a trademark a criminal offence. Between the 1860s and the 1880s the various Australian parliaments enacted their first laws to register trademarks, thus curbing those backyard manufacturers who had found it profitable to copy the labels of well-known products. In Melbourne as late as 1874 a maker of perfumes and soaps issued large advertisements warning the public that his labels were being copied by competitors. 'Beware of imitations' was a warning often made by makers of popular products. The registering and protecting of trademarks was a simple answer to these commercial pirates, and from the old public registers come most of the trade-marks reproduced in this book.
The trademarks reflect changing customs and attitudes, ways of leisure and ways of work. A century ago the average Australian drank more tea than did the average citizen of any other country, and tea was widely advertised in many brands. The words of 'Waltzing Matilda' were first popularised in the advertisements for a brand known as 'Billy Tea'. Country people travelling in the train to Melbourne saw the city coming closer because every mile a coloured enamelled plate announced that it was so many miles to the home of Griffiths' Tea. Boots were a strong source of trademarks because most men walked long distances in the course of a week and did work which demanded strong boots. As boots and shoes were expensive, boot polish was vital and gave rise to some of the best known trademarks. Indeed at one time 'Nugget', the trademark for one brand of shoe polish, became the common word for shoe polish in many parts of Australia.
These commercial signs captured the excitement of great events. Gold rushes still fired the imagination of Australians, and so gold-mining terms were popular in commercial trademarks. Words such as 'digger' and 'nugget' were used again and again. Allen's the confectioner made 'Gold Nuggets', and a rival made 'Old Gold' chocolate. A digger panning for gold was the trademark of a large Bendigo maker of jams and pickles. Overseas firms trading in Australia in the era between 1900 and 1914 liked to use gold in their trademarks, and an American tobacco was called 'Welcome Nugget' and an Austrian brand of matches was called 'The Nugget of the Southern Seas'.
The word 'Australia' did not appear on many trademarks until the eve of the creation of the Commonwealth. After 1901 a map of Australia appeared on dozens of trade-marks. One early trademark embodying a map of Australia was registered by a Melbourne photographer. Facing that difficulty which a host of commercial artists would later face - do we include Tasmania or save a little space - he found his own spectacular solution. In his trademark he moved Tasmania two thousand miles to the west where it could be neatly moored just off the south-west corner of the continent. One hopes that the photographs he took were truer to life.
The new Commonwealth gave birth to scores of trademarks on which stood native animals - even the dingo had his day. The First World War was almost as fertile for new trademarks. The word 'digger' acquired a new meaning. Appeals to patriotism filled tins and boxes, 'Our Wounded Hero Brand' went so far as to depict a one-legged digger. In l915, the year of Anzac, that trademark was so blatant that it was rejected by the government. In the same year thousands of Australian soldiers camped near the pyramids before sailing from Egypt to Gallipoli. Accordingly a Goulburn manufacturer called his brand of shoes 'Pyramid Girl'. One wonders whether the women of Goulburn, sensing what the pyramid girls were doing in Australian tents, boycotted the shoes.
Curiously, there are few appeals to sex in the trademarks in this book. At first glance the trademark of Parson's Starch, registered in 1903, hints at restrained sex appeal. It shows a woman wearing a white ground-rustling dress, beneath which peeps the tip of one shoe. But she is called 'A White Australian' - an appeal to race rather than sex in that decade when the White Australia policy was shaped. Women shoppers must have bought most of the white starch which was used daily for stiffening clothes; and a starch advertisement was unlikely to have been designed in the hope of titillating men.
Many of the trademarks have a simplicity which borders on the naive. A brand of shoe-polish was called 'Sparkling Wine'. An eye medicament of the 1920s was registered as 'Mallee Eye Drops'. In the era when many people spoke in rhyming slang the simple play on words was central to some trademarks. In the early 192Os, after the visit to Australia of the Prince of Wales, the Swan Brewery in Perth registered the trademark of one beer as the 'Prince of WA ALES'. In the 1930s the trademark of one medical potion, known as Kure-ettes, showed two clergymen - obviously curates. Although simple plays on words were relatively common, trick spelling (e.g. 'rite' instead of 'right') seems to have been uncommon in trademarks until recent times. It may well be that in the last century, when illiteracy was a serious problem, trick spelling was deemed a serious offence, for it could easily mislead adults who were painfully learning how to spell. Furthermore, at a time when so many adults could not spell correctly, trick spelling was more likely to be interpreted as evidence that the owner of the trademark was illiterate rather than clever.
The trademark is valuable as a barometer of nationalism. While much has been written about early nationalism in the labour movement, less has been written about the nationalism of merchants, shopkeepers and factory owners. And yet both kinds of nationalism were important, and it may well be that the nationalism of the marketplace was far more influential in the 1890s and early 1900s. One source of this influence was the trademark, which thrived in the mass media - the daily newspaper, shop window, tobacco tin, and the billboard. We forget that the billboards on railway stations and city streets were mass media in the era before radio and television, and that these advertising hoardings were the shrines of the trademark. Indeed commercial awareness of the value of these insignia influenced the new Commonwealth's own insignia. In the national competition for an Australian flag in 1901, most of the prize-money came from the magazine Review of Reviewsand from Havelock Tobacco. The Southern Cross which appeared on the new flag had already appeared in many well-known trademarks.
This first book on Australian trade-marks displays imagination, flair, and a feel for the past: Mimmo Cozzolino would not dream of calling himself a historian; but he is.
Geoffrey Blainey
University of Melbourne June 1980
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BENEATH THE LINO
by Phillip Adams
From Symbols of Australia,pg 13, 14
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How does one define Mimmo Cozzolino, the extraordinary young man responsible for this book? He's not really the author, yet he's far more than an editor. I think I'll settle for a Trade Marxist.
Consider the eerie parallels... while Mimmo was born at Herculaneum in 1949, within the shadow of Vesuvius, I was born here, in 1939, within the shadow of the Dandenongs. Well, within a 60-minute drive.
Mimmo spent his childhood at the Herculaneum diggings, peeking under the black curtains at the graffiti of a mythic figure with an enormous phallus. Meanwhile, he studied Latin. I spent my childhood at the Kew tip, searching through the layers of refuse for interesting artifacts. Such as Mickey Mouse mantels, old car batteries and Marchant's lemonade bottles which were worth threepence at the milk bar. Meanwhile, I studied Latin.
These days, I frequently dart off to Italy where I snuffle into the Tuscan topsoil in the hope of finding the broken shards of an Etruscan chamber pot. In fascinating juxtaposition, Mimmo has established himself as the leading archaeologist of Australian advertising, and is frequently seen peeling the lino from old kitchen floors, in the hope of discovering some yellowed newspaper that, in turn, will yield an undiscovered Abo brandname.
It is well known that every intelligent, educated person with a refined sensibility despises and detests advertising, regarding all who toil for Mammon as the moral equivalents of used-car salesmen and the social equals of lepers. Yet old advertising is different. Already 1960s TV commercials have lost their commercial sting, metamorphosising into the iconography of nostalgia. Like popular songs, faded photographs and old Boomerang Songsters, they give us a sense of our past, reminding us of what went on beneath the newspaper headlines and the epic concerns of academic historians. Like Carter at the tomb of Tut, Mimmo takes us into forgotten times. And as he blows the dust from his invaluable collection of engravings and scraper-boards, the counterpart to Tut's priceless jetsam, our earliest tycoons and financial pharaohs live again.
Australians are very embarrassed about patriotism. Amongst most of my Labor voting colleagues, it's been renounced since the Kerr coup. Yet I defy any Oztralian to turn Mimmo's pages without feeling the goose bumps (if not the goose steps) of nationalism. True, many of the symbols are racist or involve appalling puns. Yet somehow they seem infinitely preferable to those of the 1980s where the overwhelming majority of brands on our TV screens or supermarket shelves are alien. Or to be more specific, American. To hell with Colonel Sanders - give me Ballarat Bertie any time. And I'd love to see Mimmo's gun-toting kangaroo give Mickey Mouse, Esso's tiger and Uniroyal's steel cat their marching orders.
But enough of this tub thumping. Let me tell you about Mimmo. Twenty years ago, his parents decided to migrate to Argentina, only to discover that immigration to that country had been cancelled. They subsequently chose Australia because it was 'the second furtherest place to migrate to'. On arrival at Port Melbourne, they were immediately plonked in a cattle train to Bonegilla migrant camp where they suffered from both AC and DC culture shock. It seems the camp was run by a German who'd learnt to strut his stuff with the SS.
Mimmo spent the next five years trying to learn English which he describes as 'a funny language'. His father, a printer by trade, is still trying.
To the general dismay of parents, relatives and teachers, Mimmo enrolled at Prahran College, studying art and design. In his final year he picked up a $1000 prize for winning the Australian section of an international Sugar Mark competition. Thus began his commitment to Trade Marxism.
I first met Mimmo when he was in partnership with a young Greek named Con Aslanis. Their company was called 'All Australian Graffiti' and was motived by 'a mad desire by two crazy wogs to prove themselves in a WASP industry.' In the past immigrants like William Dampier and James Cook had discovered Australia. In the early 197Os, Mimmo and Con discovered it all over again.
In Symbols of Australia Mimmo confronts Australians with a host of ancient hieroglyphs which, I think, add weight to my hypothesis that this nation was founded by ancient Egyptians who dropped off on their way to South America. (In South America they were known as the Aztecs: here, the Anzacs.) Their arrival, in small craft, is celebrated each year in the Henley Regatta on the Yarra, which earned its name from the ceremonial cry of the Anzacs ... 'Yea! Ra!'. This ritual would have been observed by the high priest standing on the steps of their pyramid, the Shrine of Remembrance, so reminiscent of Cheops, soaring above the Nile.
Rather than directing you to specific hieroglyphs, I will let you enjoy a voyage of discovery. And if you're feeling hot and sweaty by page 141, fear not - you'll be rejuvenated by that aromatic shandy (the quintessence of prickly pear) Eau de Queensland.
Phillip Adams
June 1980
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NOTES ON THE TEXT:
Mimmo Cozzolino, G Fysh Rutherford
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We believe that this is a picture book. But it is a picture book with a story to tell. In symbols, characters, words and slogans. All contained within the individual trademarks. When arranged chronologically, they reflect the history, the values, the development and the nationalism that has gone into building an Australian heritage.
Their authors are the forgotten individuals who commissioned them, and the unsung artists who created them. Although many of these marks may now seem flippant or trivial, there was a time when each one was thought about, discussed and paid for. Our notations merely enlarge their story by giving the reader a better perspective on the role and source of individual marks. Unfortunately, the real history of most trademarks is lost in the discarded guard books of printers and advertising agencies, or it is seldom recorded in corporate archives.
Method of selection:
In making our choice of visual material, we used a definition of a trademark that is, perhaps, wider than traditionally accepted. To us a trademark is any image, word, symbol, colour, emblem, coat of arms, shield, seal, signature, slogan, label, package, object, jingle, or personality which is presented and used consistently over a period of time so as to be recognised and associated with a product, service, manufacturer, organisation, or person.
The material selection was based on our personal preference. We have not offered a complete representation of all major Australian companies. A few, in fact, are conspicuous by their absence. The material was primarily chosen for its visual or verbal interest, and to a minor extent, for its historical relevance. In essence, if we liked it, or we liked what it reflected, it was included.
The marks in this book can be broadly classified as:
- Marks that contain obvious Australian symbolism, e.g.: nationalism, maps, flora, language, landmarks.
- Marks for products that, although not containing any specific Australian symbolism, have become part of our consumer heritage, e.g.: Aspro, Arnott's, Vegemite, Minties, Aeroplane Jelly and Foster's Lager.
- Marks for unknown products or marks lacking in Australian symbolism but representing absurd, humorous or obscure thinking that was an integral part of the 'try anything once' attitude of a developing nation.
Our research covered four specific areas:
- Directly from packaging, posters and advertising or correspondence with companies and individuals.
- The State Library of Victoria for periodicals and newspapers,
- The Commonwealth Government Patents, Trademarks and Designs Office for applications of trademarks from 1906 to the present.
- The Australian Archives, Canberra, for colonial registers of trademarks prior to 1906.
The earliest surviving records of registered trademarks are the individual colonial registers. Laws relating to the registration of trademarks were enacted in South Australia in 1863, Queensland and Tasmania in 1864, New South Wales in 1865, Victoria in 1876 and Western Australia in 1885. We therefore set the opening date of research at 1860. We found, however, very little, value or interest in any of the colonial registers before the 1880s. Even newspapers and journals from the same period had little to offer. The closing date of 1960 marked the introduction, to Australia, of a new wave graphic approach to trademarks. This date has been adhered to; the only exception being the inclusion of current marks which show a design progression.
Dating:
The date of a trademark shown in the text is, unless otherwise stated, the date of applicationfor registration. But, because registration is not required by law, many trademarks were in use long before they were registered. For example, page 81 would have read:
-
(c) Evenden's Spring Head.
Sidney Cooke Pty Ltd,
Melbourne,
Nails; 1906
When the new Commonwealth Trademarks Register was introduced in 1906, the resultant publicity would have made them revise their thinking and apply for registration.
Wherever possible we have verified dates supplied by individuals or companies, but inconsistencies may still arise. In such, cases we would appreciate readers' comments.
Structure:
The book is divided into two sections. The first, 'Reflections', contains marks with a unique Australian flavour. The second, 'Observations', contains marks arranged in product classifications. Each sub-section is arranged chronologically, the only exception being specific corporate histories or pages requiring special design consideration. With individual entries the usual text format is:
 |
The visuals at the foot of the text column are either contemporary, of special interest, or of a supportive nature.
Conclusions:
Australian commercial symbology is sadly overlooked, by most Australians. The Trademarks Office now accepts mere photostats as possibly the only surviving record of a trademark. Corporations shed their identities with increasing regularity, discarding them without record. And commercial artists continue to work without personal credit.
As we have already stated, this book was written by the forgotten businessmen who commissioned the trademarks and the unknown artists who created them. It is our hope that after reading theirbook, individuals will be inspired to keep detailed corporate archives ensuring a comprehensive record of this revealing area of Australia's heritage.
G. Fysh Rutherford & Mimmo Cozzolino
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MIMMO'S DINKUM MEMORY-JOGGER
By Helen Garner
The National Times,October 12 to 18, 1980
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Mimmo Cozzolino's book Symbols of Australia,a black and white collection of Australian trademarks, is fat, wide and handsome, a joy to behold.
For $9.95 you get nearly 200 big pages of pleasure: a layout that serves the graphics, reference, information and comment unobtrusively but accessibly run down the outer edge of each page, a system of categorisation which flows with pleasant good sense, a thorough index, the trademarks themselves in all their splendid range of imagination, innocence and ingenuity; and perhaps most enjoyably of all, unlimited points of re-entry into those areas of one's own past which usually stir only dimly at the outskirts of memory.
It's hard to make a disciplined approach to the reading of this book, it's so full of traps for the eye. But one notices immediately the convenience, for designers, of an island continent with such a chubby, recognisable shape. Particularly after Federation, maps of Australia proliferated as advertising motifs and trademarks. My favourite is the nightingale 'Mop of Australia,' but there are scores of others.
Of course, as Geoffrey Blainey points out in his introduction, Tasmania has always presented a slight annoyance, trailing as it does, awkwardly off the bottom of the map. But one Melbourne photographer in his logo of 1900 or thereabouts, by a superbly nonchalant stroke, simply shifted the offending isle 2,000 miles further west and dropped it just off the south coast of Western Australia, thus achieving a pleasing, if geographically inaccurate, symmetry.
The often tenuous connection between a product and the emblem chosen to advertise it is one of the most entertaining aspects of the book, and bears witness, it seems to me, to a certain pleasure taken by graphic artists in the work for its own sake.
A lovely drawing of a possum on a branch, nibbling leaves against a full moon, is inscribed 'Good for the gums.' This turns out to be the trade-mark for teats for babies' bottles, in 1923. A circle of safety pins represents a brand of soft drinks, in 1912. One brand of boot polish is called 'sparkling wine' - perhaps an unconscious fantasy of a sophisticated life attainable only to those whose shoes are shiny. The imaginative life of a commercial artist may even have been leisurely, before psychology made its intrusion and advertising got serious.
We see the evolution of the Redhead match girl from 1946 to 1979, through four phases. Not only does her hairdo change; her mouth half opens, her eye-lids drop slightly, her expression becomes sexually inviting. It makes you furious to see how things like that sneak up on you.
Aborigines have been liberally used as emblems, often offensively and crudely. But I noticed differences (at least in the selection offered here) between the treatment of Aborigines and that of the 'jolly nigger boy.'
While the Aboriginal in quite a few samples is represented as an impressive figure, often in silhouette and slightly distanced, holding weapons or simply gazing away from the observer, the jolly nigger boy, of African mien, is tame, grins amiably or cheekily at us, and is often portrayed in predicaments obviously meant to be comical - being eaten by a crocodile, pursued by an enraged ostrich from which he has just plucked a handful of feathers or stolen an egg.
The jokes are simple, the puns unsubtle. The outright appeals to sexual or sophisticated aspirations are few. The life one senses behind the old trademarks is very daily,its needs basic, to do with the work of the home (flour, beer, tea , boot polish, cure-alls) and particularly with country work (rabbit-killers, fly-killers, prickly-pear killers, manures, stock medicine, chook feed).
Looking at these emblems, these often laboured insignias, I think of my grandmother, who came from Hopetoun in the Mallee and whose utterances were few. When she was tired she was 'jiggered'; she said 'presently' instead of 'soon,' and 'directly' for 'straightaway'; we were warned to be careful when using the chamber pot 'for fear you soil the carpet'; an argument she referred to as a 'yike,' a serious disagreement 'a decent yike.'
Perhaps this is the extra gift of the book - that it provokes such bursts of memory, such shocks of familiarity. Each reader will find his or her own particular tack. I've been poring over it on and off for a week, and it keeps happening to me.
Among the trademarks for strange rural products - Notix, Smokogas the gas of destruction, shear-to-shear arsenical - I stumble upon a Clag label, the real one, none of your plastic rubbish, dated 1898. And around it, like a swarm of flies disturbed by a does of Antibizzbuzz, leaps up a host of details - a glass bottle of Clag on the first day of the school year, the wooden-handled brush, the metal lid through which the brush handle was thrust, leaving a little explosion of tin spikes.
In 1914 the Grain Foods Company of Australia depicted in its trademark a Dutch girl in white apron, clogs and curved cap. Her clothes fix her as Dutch. But what is this gesture of the left arm, this instinctive raising of the forearm and placing it across the brow, to shield the eyes from harsh light? It is a gesture so unmistakenably Australian that one glances at her costume, to make sure.
The range of patent cure-all trademarks is quite frightening - cures for epilepsy, for what look like rose-thorn scratches, for headaches, consumption, nervous complaints. For what ailment was Dr Boxwell's 'Silent Pill' for females? On the cover lurks the Aspro mark: 'Women's best friend,' reminding us of those old 'unsolicited testimonials' for Bex powders from Mrs S. of Cronulla, which boiled down to nothing more than statements of addiction.
There is a section on lollies which, to one who lost her dental health to a combination of Lyptees or Coca-Cola in Scutcheon's milk bar in Geelong, looks slightly impoverished. But then Mimmo Cozzolino only got to Australia in 1960, when lollies were well into heavy packaging, if I remember rightly, instead of being sold loose under glass from boxes between which dead or dying blowies lay in profusion.
When I was a child in the 40s, aniseed balls were 12 a penny, mint leaves eight, bullets eight, and not those mingy little scraps which pass for bullets these days. And show bags were free.At the grocer's you could ask for, and be respectfully served with, 'tuppence worth of broken biscuits' - and they came out of a big tin marked Swallow's and Ariell's, not some crummy cellophane packet.
Whoever reads this book will revel in it. Surely Australia must be the only country in the world where as late as 1954 a deodorant would be registered under the name of 'Go-poof.' In 1947 a mouse trap company called its product 'Choke-a-mouse.'
I'm envious of Mimmo Cozzolino for the laughs he must have had during this great search of his. Not only the heavy-handed literalness of the Choke-a-mouse, Rat-menu, Moo-vellous variety, but the flights of fancy of the more unfettered imaginations make this a book of endless fascination, laughter and delight.
Reproduced with permission of Helen Garner,
© Helen Garner 1980
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