Get everyone welcome to conversations. My guest today is a man who I recognize him and remember him as somebody heavily involved in the boxing industry. But he is a renowned journalist and a prolific author. Has written some amazing books, mainly about Australian personalities, heroes and the like. He's in town and Adelaide and has wandered into the studio to promote his new book at Kellerman, The Australian Mermaid. And my guest is Grantly Keyser. Grantly, how are you very well?
Thank you very much for having me Cornsey. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.
You've just wandered down to Adelaide. You're a Sydney sided by birth. We don't know if I get them down here. Truly appreciative of our city.
Oh good on you. I was actually born in Ballarate. I worked for twenty five nearly thirty years in Sydney and now I live in Queensland. Yes, I've been a bit all over the place. Why, Oh well, Queensland is where I grew up. I was born in ballaratte but I grew up in Queensland and I left there I left Sidney in about twenty years ago because it was getting too busy for me. But now every time I go back to promote books or do interviews or whatever, I find it's even ten times busy than it used
to be. There's just so many people these days.
Are you a full time author?
Yeah, yeah, very much. I write two books a year. We produce a big hardback book every Christmas, and in the middle of the year we do a paperback and the last few have been about amazing women. I wrote about the incredible Vivian Bullwinkle last year, a great nurse and a great Australian hero who went to school in Adelaide.
But she's of course most famous for surviving a massacre of nurses in World War Two and coming back to Australian and she devoted the rest of her life to helping save other lives and honoring the nurses who didn't come back. So that was a great book last year, and this year I was just compelled to write about Anette Kellman, who is just one of the most extraordinary Australians of all time, and sadly, fifty years after she's
passed away. A lot of people don't remember her. She was at one stage the greatest female athlete in the world and the highest paid movie star in the world. And she's Australian and she had a lot to do with Adelaide. She performed diving and swimming shows at at the Old City Bars in Adelaide. And when she took off overseas to make her name in England and the United States, she left from Adelaide. She came out to Adelaide and left from Largs Bay.
Yeah. I felt a bit guilty actually, because I remember the name. And then the more I looked at your book researched her, My goodness, why do we not know a little bit more about this? Look, I guess the thing that hit me straight away with the salacious aspect, because she was a movie star as well, and she appeared new She was the first nineteen sixteen Yeah, in a movie that I could not comprehend.
That incredible, it was. It's controversial now, It was incredibly controversial at the time, but the censors passed it because they said that she was celebrating the human form, just as the great masterpieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those great painters painted new women she was doing the
same thing. So even though it was very salacious and titillating, and she sold millions of tickets to young men and teenage boys who flocked to the front row of the cinema to look at her form, she passed all the senses and when you look back at it, that's pretty much what she was doing. She was saying that women around the world, you're beautiful, be proud of your bodies, and you know, look after your health and fitness, and you can be a goddess like me.
I saw a photo and I don't know whether it's in your book still from the movie. Yeah, her private part seem to be covered by her long hair. But how expressive revealing was it?
Oh? Well, very much. She was totally newded Later in the life in her adies, she got a little bit touch the modesty as a very elderly woman. I heard several interviews where she said, I was actually wearing a body stocking. But there was millions of people that gave that movie very close inspection. It was one of the huge hit movies of around World War One, and no one ever saw any hint of fabric.
So how did you wonder upon and ed Killerman.
Well, yeah, well I knew a little bit about Annette. I knew that she'd been a great swimmer, and coming from Queensland, of course, swimmings are used sport up there, and we had some great swimmers in the past, and I knew and ned had been a great swimmer, and
I also knew that she'd appeared in movies. But a few years ago SBS produced a program called Australian Color I think it was, and they took all the old news real footage from the early nineteen hundreds and colorized it, so it really brought it to life, and some of it was Annet Kellman doing diving and swimming routines. And I knew that she was a controversial figure of those days and it'd sort of broken taboos, and I just wanted to explore more about her life, to get to
know what she'd done. And the more that I delved into it, I just found her absolutely extraordinary. And I say this, if she was an American or even an english woman, we'd be all sitting down to watch streaming programs about her incredible fame and her great successes in life. And yet, sadly, fifty years after she passed away on the Gold Coast in virtual anonymity. She's just an asterisk in history, a name people might know a little bit about, but they don't really understand.
She was sickly as a child though, Yeah, you're right, yeah she was.
Her life stories it's so inspiring, you know. She had ricketts as a child and she could barely walk and she had to wear very painful steel and leather braces on her legs. But her parents heard that maybe salt water or swimming exercises might strengthen her legs a little bit, though they were more or less told by doctors that
she'd never have really good mobility. But they took her down to a place called Cavel's Baths, which is right next to where the Sydney Opera House is now, and they had in those days a fenced off area as swimming bath Sea Baths, and the guy that ran it was a guy called Fred Cavell, who was an Englishman who attempted the English Channel a few times. And he had a big family of sons who are all champion swimmers. And they taught little Annette, who was terrified of the
water at that stage. They taught her to swim and she became not only did it strength in her legs, but being in the water, she sort of she wrote later that she sort of had a spiritual connection with the water. She really felt at home, like she was a fish, like a mermaid in the water. And it was only a few years later that she was setting all sorts of world records in swimming at one stage,
and it's hard to believe now looking back. At one stage she had held every female swimming world record from one hundred yards to thirty six kilometers. She swam the Danube against the world's women swimming champion of the time and one into the Danube through Austria's.
Sure going down street.
Yeah, but it was it was very dangerous that she related. Often they would go over through eddies and all sorts of things, over very shallow water, over very sharp rocks, so you had to be very very careful doing the swimming. And the times that she attempted the English Channel, she said, if it was just a matter of swimming thirty eight k's from Dover to Calais, it wouldn't have been a problem.
But she had to face all these changing tides and and really rough conditions on their times that she attempted, so she was also you know, sports science wasn't the thing that it is these days. She was sponsored by Cadbury's chocolate, which was really taking off in England at the time, and her father would be feeding her through
a big funnel from a boat hot chocolate. She was trying to swim the channel, or sometimes giving a half a chicken teat she'd be eating half the chicken with one hand and swimming with the other.
Yeah, there's any vision of that her swimming style, there's.
Not so much vision. There's a vision of her swimming later in life, but there's a lot of photographs from her channel attempts. And her father had a very severe heart condition at the time and she was always so grateful to him. He didn't last all that long, but he was always out on the channel with her as her coach and I guess as her mentor and manager, really trying to inspire to keep going.
Saying you said she left from Adelaide too, Yeah, well what was she doing in Adelaide?
Well, what happened? She performed in Adelaide. She'd performed at the City Bars, which are down in King William Street down there, not there now, but she she she planned to go from Melbourne, but she went. She had she was getting offers to do all these sorts of shows all around Australia at the time, and she had a show in Bendigo, like diving shows, diving shows and swimming shows. I guess aqua ballet synchronized swimming we call it now. She was the she was really the originator of those
kind of shows. And she was doing a show in Bendigo and it was quicker to get the train down through Balleratte to Adelaide to catch the train to catch the ship going to England from from Adelaide. So she left from Adelaide.
Yeah, grantly. Keyser is my guest, folks. Renowned journalist and author. Of course, his new book is called Annette Kellerman Australian Mermaid Back shortly. If you just turned into conversations greatly Keyser, renowned journalist and author. I remember greatly heavily involved in the boxing world when he did you manage Jeff.
Jeff No, I was very, very lucky in my life. I sounds ridiculous. I'm actually in the Australian Boxing Hall of Fame and I wouldn't brew a great honors. Some people say, oh, he's a good fight, but I wouldn't brewis are great. But I used to help Johnny Lewis in the gym. He's the great, great trainer of champions. He trained six world champions. And I was training at the gym with Johnny and he sort of got me
on as his right hand man. And we had a really great team of young amateur fighters at a place called the Newtown Police Youth Club in Sydney, which isn't there anymore. It's now high rise apartments. But in those days it was a police boys club that did a lot of great things for the community.
I still have them police boys here, yeah, yeah.
Here and there, yeah, but I don't think they're quite as big as they used to be. But we had Jeff Finnick, who went to the Olympics in nineteen eighty four, should have won the gold medal, but then knocked out the Olympic gold medalist when they had a fight in a couple of years later when Jeff was world champ, and along came a guy called Jeff Harding who was as tough as nails. And I tell this story in nineteen eighty nine, Donnie La Londe, a great fight from Canada,
was due to fight a world champ, Dennis Andres. Instead elected to fight Sugar Ray Leonard for a huge, multi multimillion dollar payday, which was enormous money in nineteen eighty nine. So Jeff Harding, our young professional fighter who had been to the kom Off Games, we took him over to Atlantic City to fight the world champ, Dennis Andres, and the shift, the promoter of the fight was held in
a big casino. It was promoted by the casino owner, and he was this fairly shifty, real estate shonkiest bloke he'd ever meet, had a dreadful reputation, and his name was Donald Trump, and his reputations even worse now. But he wields a lot more power than he did, as.
When you say, shonky, what experience did you have with it?
Well, you know. He co promoted the fight with a guy called Bob Aram who's still promoting fights these days. And Bob Aaron promoted everyone from Muhammad al Li to the current great fighters in the world today, like Terrence Crawf for fifty sixty years. And he always maintains that Donald Trump ripped him off for a couple of million dollars over a sponsorship deal that he pocketed the money
and Aram never saw it. When we got there. I flew down there with Jeff Phinnick from New York and we flew through really bad weather in a very small plane to this place called Atlantic City. It's a resort town, gambling town or casinos, and the heavens sort of parted through the clouds and we looked down and we saw this big, huge ship with Trump written on the side that was his private yacht. And then when we landed, just about every building had Trump on the top. Trump Casino,
Trump boardwalk Hall, at the Trump taj Mahal. And believe it or not, like he he built his reputation, I guess on the show The Apprentices, this business genius, he actually bankrupt. He went bankrupt with casinos in Atlantic City. You know, it's like it's like going bankrupt selling ice creams on the Gold Coast, you know, like it's just ridiculous. But he had a terrible reputation as a guy that just didn't pay debts and just dudded people. And you
couldn't believe anything he said. So was making the President of the United States be too political.
Amazing haws. He has supporters. Yeah there, yeah, and it killum. And let's get back to I mentioned the swimming style. Yeah, I mean, I didn't think three style swimming sort of became in vogue until Juke can't.
Yeah, well it was Alec Wickman was. Wickham was a pioneer of the free style in Australia, and so were some of the cowle boys who helped coach a Net, so freestyle was sort of taking off there. Alec Wickham's relative as Tracy Wickham, who was a great swimmer many many years later, of course, but Alec Wickham was a great swimmer at the turn of the nineteen hundreds. But a Net favored a lot of swimmers at the time favored a thing called the trudgeon, which you don't see
much anymore. Was a little bit like a side stroke. Someone likened it to a cat curled up on a couch and then stretching out with one arm going over and pulling back. It was a very yeah, kind of like a side stroke where the arm comes over the head and then pushes pulls back. Yeah, very unusual stroke, and it's probably no wonder. You don't see it much anymore, but it was very popular at the time.
How efficient would it have been?
Well, you know people wham the English Channel using it, so it was really yeah, yeah, it's of course freestyle seems a much much better way of swimming than that, but it was very popular for a long long time.
How did your research, Annett Killerman, Well, I was given the fact that you know, it's fifty years since.
I was very fortunate and I can't understate how famous she was in her day. I mean, newspapers covered around the world, New York and Britain and Australia covered just about everything she ever did, and it also wrote some memoirs, and she exaggerated a little bit some of the tales. She was telling her story to Hollywood in the nineteen fifties and so some of the stories she told were a little bit exaggerated, but I could cross reference them
with different newspaper reports. And I was also very fortunate that the State Library in New South Wales has a lot of her collection. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney also had a display some years ago of more than two hundred of her show costumes. Costumes that she would wear in movie and the great stage shows that she did.
But going through her own personal collections. And I've been so lucky with so many of the books I've written, you know, like with people like John Monash, or the Great Governor of New South Wales, Lockwom Macquirite, actually have their personal effects that I can go through and it's almost like a spiritual connection.
They're in archives, different archives.
Yeah. When I wrote the book, a very large book on John Monash about twenty fifteen.
That's the Great Australian in general, the great General.
Yeah, there was one hundred and eighty five boxes of his memorabilia at the National Library in camera and I was able to go through and hold in my hand, you know, the little pocket diary that he had on Gallipoli, you know, twenty five April, twenty six April, marking off
the days, you know, bombs overhead. I hope I get out of it, you know, like quite extraordinary and even the most intimate things letters he wrote to girlfriends, And you know it's just I really love what I'm doing because I have that connection with people of the past and with a net. I went through so much of her, so much of her personal collection of letters and memorabilia, you know, even down to the very last bank book
she had. Not long before she passed away. She had fifteen dollars and forty two cents left in the CBA account at Southport. She went down and took fifteen bucks out. Yeah, that's all she had. She was an age pensioner at the end of her life, living on the Gold Coast
in a flat or are. It's quite amazing. She in her heyday in the nineteen twenties, and even before that she had a big mansion just outside New York where the movie business was centered in those days before World War One, and then later on she had a big, very big sort of glass and steelhouse outside Hollywood at Santa Monica in California. But she gave most of her money away during World War Two, helping raise money for
the Red Cross. She put on all these huge stage shows in Sydney and other parts of Australia to raise money for the Red Cross and the war effort, and she funded those shows herself. So much of her fortune was dissipated and the end of her life, as I was able to go through all her things, even receipts for things like when she was eighty eight she got a hearing aid from OPSM and she had to pay it off in installments of a couple of dollars a week. You know, quite amazing, and you know, I just had
that feeling of empathy for her. Here was a woman who was and I can't state that she was one of the most famous women in the world the turn of the nineteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds, and yet she was quite happy.
Watch how could she achieve that worldwide fame? Was it through silent movies or of something else.
Even before that, she was a great well, she was a great female athlete. So she was the first really well known female athlete in the world. And the things
that she did was were quite extraordinary. But then she had huge stage shows in both London and in the United States, different parts of the United States, and she would perform at places like the Big Theaters in New York for six month runs, doing massive shows on stage with lots of glass tanks and diving into tanks, and she'd have backup swimmers by her and they'd be like mermaid aquatic shows on stage. And so her fame was extraordinary and that's what led to the movies.
But one of them did she really worked with Charlie Chaplin, oh very much.
And Charlie Chaplin Buster Keaton used to be on her undercard shows.
You know.
She would be performing these big she would be the headline act and underneath would be young Buster Keaton, you know. Or she would be doing a show in New York and Charlie Chaplin would be on the preliminary show, the sort of the entree show.
Charlie Chaplin would have hit on her, tried to work I think.
I think lots of people tried to work her. Yeah. Yeah. She was married for nearly sixty years and the man that she was, they were together for nearly seventy years, quite amazing, which is very unusual in Hollywood days. And it's remarkable that later in life you were just saying, weird did she live? She turned her back on all that great fame and fortune for quite some time. She actually lived on a little fishing shack and a place called Newry Island in the wit Sundays on the Great
Barrier reef. And I met some of her relatives in the course of writing the book. Who whose parents knew her? In those days. This is in the nineteen thirties and forties, nineteen thirties, and they said that, you know, Nette had have friends on all the other islands in the Sundays as well, that she'd know. But she'd never take a boat. She'd always swim to the other islands to see it. Often several miles of swimming through the ocean. White, quite amazing.
The sharks up there, the sharks, and there's stingers and all sorts of things. But yeah, she would often swim, swim, She would swim. She was an extraordinary person. And if you see her later in life, she remained super fit well into her eighties. There's photograph in the book of her doing ballet exercises, and she's well into her eighties and she's as limber as she was when she was in her twenties.
You opened the book by describing a movie scene with Esther Williams. Yeah, and she wasn't all that happy that Esther Williams was having an affair with the lead male act of Victim Mature. How on earth would you have research that?
Well? Esther Williams told all Esther, Esther was very much on kiss and tell. Yeah, even at the time things were happening. She was very very forward with her lovely talk with her talk about a love life air and it was no prude, but she was very happy that Hollywood was making the movie about her. But if you know the move, if anyone seen the movie, it's not
really the story of Antt Kelleman's life. It's a vehicle to show these hundreds of swimming girls in bathing costumes, diving and cavorting in the water like fish and seals and looking really glamorous and beautiful. And it's a real cavalcade of color. It was made by the same man who made The Wizard of Oz and the choreographer was Buzzby Berkeley, like a legend on Broadway. But didn't really
tell the true story of Anette's life. And that's why I felt, you know, she was really deserving of her book that stated everything that she did in her life. And I really think that the fame and the great deeds that she did really deserve to be recognized in this day and age.
Grantly Keyser as my guest, folks. His new book is called Annett Kellerman Australian Mermaid. I'd heard the name of it, had no idea of the fame backshort, welcome back to conversations. Everybody who had just tuned in. My guest in the studio happens to be in the studio often we're on zoom. But Grantly Keysa is in town to promote his new book called Annette Kellerman Australian Mermaid, and have you been listening, you would learn a lot about Annett We probably didn't realize.
And I'm fascinated that a bit disappointed in myself, but I didn't know more about her. She was disappointed that the movie of her life starring Esther Williams and Victim Mature didn't really that portrayer as she wanted to be portrayed.
That's right. She was very disappointed in the casting of Victim Mature as her husband because her husband, Jimmy Sullivan, who she was with for just about seventy years and they were married for nearly sixty years. Victim Mature, if anyone remembers him, was a great star of sword and
Sandal epics. He's a big south By fighting the gladiators and whatever, very very serious soul kind of guy, whereas and It's husband, Jimmy Sullivan was a very genial, happy, sort of lovely guy, and the movie portrayed her husband as a slick, carnival hustler hustling people, and he was the absolute opposite of that, and they had a remarkable
marriage and a remarkable life together. Jimmy Sullivan just started out as a gopher more or less for Anette's father who was acting, who's a manager at the time, and it took some years. He had an enormous crush on her net from the moment that they met, because Annette at the time was like.
The whole world had an enormous crush on.
It, and its reputation was as the perfect woman, and that was her billing that Harvard University gave her that time, because she was such a glamorous and such a super fit athlete. She was like wonder woman fifty years or sixty years before the movies, and he had an enormous
crush on her. It took her some years to realize that the love of her life was right before and they eventually got married and were together through highs and lows and enormous fame, and then at the end, Jimmy Sullivan was just as happy to live in a little flat at the northern end of the Gold Coast. And back in the nineteen sixties the Gold Coast wasn't the high rise and luxury hotels. It was mostly caravan and fishing shacks. But he was very, very happy with that life.
And they were together until he's passing in nineteen seventy one. And then and Nett passed away four years later. And after Annett's husband died, and Net's younger sister, called Marcel, she lived just around the corner and a little firebro house that's the suburbs now called Labrador or Ravy Bass, sort of on the board of there, and she lived
just around the corner. And so when Nett moved in with her and a little firerow house, this this famous glamorous movie star of bygone times living with her widow's sister in this little house. And they did a radio interview or recorded an interview with a film story in just not long before and it died and I were talking about the great movie days and Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton and May Wester and all those people. And while the interview's on, you can hear and Net's sister doing the dishes in the sink right behind her, and she'd be calling out, hey, mips, that was Charlie Chaplin. That did that, wasn't it.
Yeah?
Yeah, and that was him. You know. Did she have children, No, both her and didn't. I think Annette was so in love with the stage in the days when the child bearing days that she didn't have children, but she was. She was a wonderful mentor to many many young people, young swimmers and young divers and young show people coming along who sort of regarded her as a maternal kind of figure.
Which you've known the Olympic champions of the Dawn Frasers.
Oh yeah, she met Dawn Fraser in the nineteen fifties. She came out for the Melbourne Olympics as a special guest of Robert Menzies, the Prime minister at the time. So she also raced against as a youngster in Sydney, she raced against some of the girls who went on to the Olympic Games, Fanny Durak and Amena Wiley. She beat them in races as well.
Yeah, yeah, she didn't.
Yeah, that's right. Well, when Annette was swimming, when the net was at the peak of her swimming prowess, women weren't swimmers at the Olympics. Wasn until sometime later.
You make the point about how she championed the cause of the women who wanted to reveal a bit more themselves on the beaches.
Yeah, oh, that's right. She was the first. I think that she was the first great fitness influencer for women. I mean, very common to day on Instagram and things like that, but she was sending out fitness manuals for women right from about nineteen ten, and she had thousands and thousands of followers around the world. She was so popular that the fitness manuals so popular she set up an office on Broadway and she was sending out these regular catalogs and books on fitness. She wrote books on
physical fitness and training and diet. And she also had like she reached millions of people because she had newspaper columns in the Australian press, in the British press, and the American press, and they were all those newspaper publishers were so keen to promote her as the one great icon of female fitness, and it did so much, I think, to empower women around the world to throw off the shackles.
She used to say that, you know things when she was coming along, that most women walk corsets and cover their bodies up. And she was very very much for celebrating the human form, as we.
Saw in the nineteen sixteen movie where she took everything off.
Yeah it was. It wasn't just in that movie. She revealed herself in all the films that she made, and I think she just had an absolute great time celebrating the human form and encouraging other women to you be like this too, you can be like me.
And when she died, poor well she died. Yeah, famous names, those famous places.
Certainly and reduced circumstances. But she was happy to be. I think she was happy just to live a quiet life after all the fame. But you know, I was talking about the possessions that I went through of and
it's in the archives. One of them was this really beautiful letter from the head of the International Swimming Hall of Fame and he writes to her, and it had become so anonymous or forgotten, I guess in the late in the nineteen seventies he had to put out he was in Florida, but he put newspaper advertisements in the Austra and Press, asking if anyone knew the whereabouts of
the famous swimmer and film star and Neett Kellman. As someone did, they gave him her address on the Gold Coast and the little firebrough house where she was living, and he wrote the most beautiful letter to her. He'd set up, he said, and we want to induct you
into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. We've got Johnny wise Muller who played and was an Olympic gold medalist, and Buster Crabb who was an Olympic gold medalist and played Flash Gordon in the movies, those nineteen thirties movies. We've got both of them lined up to induct you at the ceremony. He'd lined up Esther Williams to meet
Annette in Los Angeles when the flight came over. He'd also lined up a big interview with her on national television there with Barbara Walters, the famous American journalist, to talk about the great days of working with Chaplin and Buster Keaton and those guys in the movies and what she did to empower women's liberation. I guess you would call it in those early days. And at the end of the letter he says more or less, he writes,
I'm begging you, please come on it. I don't know your circumstances, but you absolutely must come because nobody, he says, nobody did more for the image of swimming in the world than you did in the early days. And she was so toughed did she go Sadly, her health was in very rapid decline at that stage, but they did induct her into the Hall of Fame, and she was very, very very proud that they had done that. How well
was she when she passed she was nearly ninety. Yeah, good life, a good life, and a life really well lived. And she, as I say, until she got very ill at the end, and her husband had passed, And of course that's sort of knocked the wind out of her sales quite a bit. He'd been like her best friend for seventy years. Until then. She was swimming every day, walking on the beach and doing her ballet exercises. There's
a photograph in the book. As I say, she's in the late eighties, still as limber as she was in the twenties.
So when we look at all those old MGM, the best, the greatest of the years, and we see those Spectacarresta Williams swimming shows and I don't know how they did it or how they even filmed, and how the girls can breathe and perform. It's all because of Annett Kellman, is it?
Well? She was the one who instigated that, you know, even the sport of synchronized swimming. She more or less started that with her stage shows the Cavalcade celebrating the human form and female athleticism, and it was the forerunner of that, and she really lived up to the tag at the human Mermaid, the Australian Mermaid.
Grantly Keiser is my guest, Folks, This book is called Annette Kellerman Fascinating Australian Mermaid so much we didn't know about it back shortly. My guest in the studio is Grantly Keyser, renowned journalist. I remember him, a journalist heavily involved in boxing and reporting on boxing and managing boxes, a significant author. I counted sixteen books, Grantly, are you saying there's more like five?
Yeah, it's well over twenty now because the last couple of years I've been writing, the last few years I've been running two a year, so the numbers stack up pretty quickly. But I just love doing it. You know, I love immersing myself in Australian history. And I always say, you know, whenever I'm doing events or talking at libraries and things, or you know, in this country, we have so many phenomenal stories, even in my own family. So many people sit down and watch it an American TV
show about American historical figures or British historical figures. I watch it for hours. You know, we have so many great stories about our own people in this country. We should be celebrating them and the people we live in. You know, like I wrote a book about Matthew Flinders. You know, there's over a hundred major geographical landmarks around Australia that bear his name, and just about every town and a city we've got a couple in Australia has
a Flinders Street or Flinders Road or whatever. And yet I guarantee most people in Australia wouldn't even know that Australia got its name from Matthew Flinders. He drew up a map. He was the first man to circumnavigate the whole continent of Australia, and he drew a map that said Australia or terrorists on it, and that's how we
got our name. But most people would know that. They might drive down Flinders Street every day, or walk down Flinda's Street, or see the Flinders University or the Flinders Range, but they don't really know much about this incredible man, you know, this man who was as a child his father. And that's why I try and in all my books, I try and humanize these subjects. You know, Matthew Flinders isn't a statue out the front of a train at
the Flinder's train station. He was a living, breathing person who's got relatives who are very live in England, are very proud of their ancestor. One of them helped me with the book, Rachel Flinders. She's a schoolteacher in England, very very proud that her great great great grandfather actually named a continent. It's not a bad feather in your
family cap. But you know, as a child, Matthew's dad took him out and showed him the Aurora Borealis up in the sky and Flinder's you know, like you could just see, you could just imagine his mind exploding at wanting to know more about the universe and the world around him. And so that's the sort of ideas I try.
To bring all that's the tenth century. Yeah, you wonder how on earth they could pursue those the danger of actually getting on a ship and sailing with great bravery.
You know. You look at his map of Australia that he drew in about eighteen oh four or eighteen o three, eighteen oh four. He drew the map and he made all those calculations of where every little inlet and bay and range was while on a ship, rocking around, holding on to a railing so he didn't fall over, and holding a spyglass to his eye or some other sort of navigational instrument as he's making calculations, you know, and then going back and jotting them down on a map.
It's quite incredible of the bravery that was all.
These things, given the fact we've got the satellite satellite imagery these days. Yeah, how accurate, very accurate.
There's not that much difference. I mean, obviously with depths of water and things, there's been modern technology to help with those kinds of things. But for a guy that was on the move all the time on a moving ship, they are very very accurate, the maps that he drew.
Why am I thinking of Peter fitz Simon when I'm talking to you? He has a similar first flour Australia. Yeah, heroes he does. Yeah, do you collaborate with him?
Not really? Are you a rival or not really? Rival? He was planning, I know he was planning a book on Matthew Flinders and I sort of gazumped him. And he's a little bit and that he just about finished. I think that he says it's coming out in a couple of years, so we'll wait to see. But if you no need to buy his, you just go out and get mine. All the bookstorts.
Did you wrot write a book about the number? Not so much Ned Kelly, but the policeman who share Ned.
Kelly actually did two books. I wrote one about the Kelly family called Missus Kelly, which was centered around his mother. Because you know, I think a lot of writers who had come before hadn't really looked at the fact that Ned Kelly was a character with a family, with people who loved him despite all his sins and these crimes. You know, the effect that his family had on him and the effect he had on his family. I mean, his criminality got his mother into all sorts of trouble.
She went to jail, and she was actually in jail, the same jail where he was hanged. You know, imagine that morning. You know, she was in the laundry where the sons being hanged in the at the same time. They were in the same jail together, and she was only really in jail because she got caught up in some of his plans. He brought police attention to them. And yeah, so he had a very very disastrous effect on all people around him. Was a hero villain, well, a little bit of both. I mean, I think you
can be a bit of both. I always kind of think that those kind of a quait ned Kelly in my mind, to an outlaw motorcycle gang leader. Now, you know, I think he was head of a criminal, small criminal empire, a horse stealing empire and a cattle stealing empire. But he had a lot of noble, gallant sort of qualities about him as well. You know, he was never known to have heard a woman. He was extremely brave or perhaps even fool hardy, but there was certainly a great
disregard for other people's lives. When he was enraged, and I think he had an extremely violent, dangerous temper.
When you compare him to a motor cycle gang leader.
Well, you know, like a leader of a criminal enterprise. Yeah, that's the way I see him. Maybe the old style, Yeah, I mean.
It's a bit more sinister to these days with the you know, the drug.
Being Oh yeah, yeah. But you know, at different times, I mean, ned Kelly thought nothing of stealing people's horses, even if there were farmers that needed the horses. He was, he was involved in lots.
Of having said that there's a lot of bikeers you go to war with, is that's right?
That's right? And I think I think you can be both hero and villain. I don't think it's as I don't think it's really black and white. He was a dangerous person, but he had lots of good qualities as well, as you know, there's probably lots of people in jail with lots of good qualities as well.
How do you go about your research?
It was very very long process with with a net and people like John Monash I mentioned earlier and others. I've got so much archival material and that really does help me with Vivian Bullwinkle. I wrote her story last year and I was so proud to so proud and happy to do that. Her closest relative, her nephew, John Bullwinkle, Lovely Chap lives at the New South Wales Southern Highlands down Barrel Bundanoon Way. He gave me so many letters
and diaries pertaining to Vivian, including this wonderful letter. I've mentioned it before in talks I've given. It was written by a guy in an age care home. He was eighty five years old and he'd been on Banker Island with Vivian when the nurses were massacred. The Japanese also shocked.
Just recount that story briefly though, and they were rounded up.
And in nineteen forty two there were a group of Australian nurses tending to wounded Australian soldiers in Singapore. And because the Japanese were known to use rape as a weapon of war and they raped their way through a hospital in Hong Kong, the Australian High Command ordered all
the nurses out of Singapore. Sixty five of one group, including Vivian, got on a ship called the viy in a brook took off for Singapore, hoping to get to what's now Jakarta was called Betaviy in those days, because the Japanese weren't there and they thought that would be a safe haven. They got halfway there when they were hit by Japanese dive bombers and their ship was actually blown out of the water. Some of the nurses drowned in the water. Some of them washed up on all
different parts of this place. Banker Island, where Vivian and twenty one other nurses washed up, they encountered almost immediately a group of Japanese soldiers who marched them back into the water and machine done them all in the back and all of them were killed except Vivian, who were shot in the back, but somehow managed to survive, and she crawled up the beach and hid in the jungle for a few days, and eventually she was eventually captured
by another group of Japanese soldiers and she spent the next three and a half years in prison camps with some of the other nurses who had survived in absolutely hellish conditions until the end of the war until they were rescued. But some of the other people who had washed up were also shot and bayoneted by the Japanese,
and there was a man who survived. His name was Eric German, and at the age of eighty five, he wrote a letter from to Vivian from a nursing home, saying, you may not remember my name, but I'm sure you remember that awful day on Banker Island more than fifty years ago. And at the end of the letter he says, both of us have have had many, many great years
since then, and he is to many more. You know, he is a man of eighty five, had been shot and bayoneted by the Japanese, and he's writing to a woman who had been shot machine gunned in the back and somehow survived. It was just a beautiful thing.
You just wonder how on earth they survived? Do you even you hear the stories of the you know, the Burma railway, and then this lady's been shot and still survived. How serious was the wound?
Well, did you the bullet went straight through it. She felt that she'd survived because she was the tallest of the group and most of them got hit in their vital organs, whereas she got hit a little bit higher at mister lungs and heart and she was very, very very lucky to survive. She was lucky to survive the bullet wound and then the subsequent she felt that she was in the water for quite some time and she felt the salt water may have helped helped preserve her Wow by cleaning the wound.
Yeah, she did gain fame and not fame, and I was gonna say notoriety, but fame later on when people truly appreciated and she was decorated too, I.
Think, oh she was. She received many, many awards and it's remarkable. Thirty years after the end of World War Two, she was the matron at Fairfield Hospital in Melbourne and she got a call asking if she'd go back to a war zone, you know, after all the horrors that she experienced, and she did. And the operation was to bring back orphan children from from Saigon, the fall of Saigon, and she she got on a Conus jet that flew to Bangkok and then a Hercules aircraft that flew up
to Sigon. And when they arrived at Saigon, it was there was machine gun fire and bombs going off, and all the horrible horrors that she'd experienced in single came back to her. But they arrived and they found all the little babies lined up, all the orphan babies lined up in shoe boxes, and they put the shoe boxes on the plane and brought them back to Australia.
Famous that story, is it.
Not, Operation Baby Lift? Yeah, it's amazing how many lives they saved.
So what's your next project.
Well, while I'm in Adelaide, I'm doing some more research about Mary Penfold and the birth of Australian wine and so that book will be out at Christmas time. And it's the story of Mary Penfold who left a very comfortable life in England to come to the frontiers, still a frontier place in those days, Adelaide in eighteen forty four, and she built up a great wine business.
In eighteen forty fours, eight years after yeah, colony was founded.
Yep, Yeah, and they planted some iron grapes they brought from the south of France, her and her husband, and Mary's sort of never really got the recognition. She was actually the winemaker and the person that turned it into a very very.
God the vineyards up McGill up at McGill.
Yeah, yeah, amazing from those humble origins she presided over a company that really just grew and grew and grew, and by the time that she retired from the business, she was way up in years, getting up towards eighty. Penfolds was producing a third of the wine in South Australia. So she turned into a very, very big operation. But it's also the story of Australian wine right across the board.
I mean, the very first fleet that came out in seventeen eighty eight, they brought wine cuttings as well to establish vines in New South Wales.
Would she have had any idea that a bottle of grange would sell whatever it sells for.
Yeah, I don't know, thousand bucks or thereabouts, maybe more.
Did she have any idea that they.
Were mostly making wine for medicinal purposes in those days? And then you know, they realized it was pretty good stuff and they started bottling and selling it commercially, and they were exporting it. Before too long, they were exporting it overseas.
Australiers went really into them. They had more like the ports and the well fortified wines.
Yeah, that's right. A lot of the colonists saw wine as a real sophistication as a real civilization rather than the grog in the early days that you know associated with the first fleet. In those early days of convicts and drum drinkers and gin drinkers, Wine was seeing seen as civilization coming to the frontier.
She must have had a husband, yea.
Her husband was doctor Christopher Raws and Penfold and there's Raws and retreat Penfolds make that. But he he is often seen as the as the brains behind it was actually Mary Penfold. She was the woman who was the driving force.
So that when is that out?
That will be out at the end of October, just in time for Christmas.
I passed before. It's like saying which one is your favorite child? You must have a favorite book, a favorite you know.
I've loved them all. I loved. I loved writing story of Hudson Fish, the guy who started a quantas I loved writing story of him. But I love writing the Hudson Fish story because his it. Hudson Fish is the guy that started quantity, started with two little biplanes and a place called long Reach in Queensland in the middle of the desert, and his two children still alive. His daughter Wendy, she was just so happy that her father had been forgotten. He started his airline nineteen twenty called
it the Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service. It was just an air taxi service for people who going stations way out in the middle of nowhere. And she was just so proud that her father had been forgotten for so long was being celebrated in a book. And I was very very proud of that, not just because it was a great story about one man's drive. He was a war hero from World War One. He came back to Australia and he thought he didn't have a job.
He thought he'd go rabbit trapping to make a few quid. Instead, he started an airline that you know, when he was running it was the greatest and most respected airline in the world.
But how did he make that quantum leap from that small air service to one of the most respected airlines in the world.
He started well, he started off as it was just doing aerial taxi work for a while between places like long Reach, clon Curry, those places way out west in Queensland. But eventually they got the contract to bring the mail from London. The mail would come from London to Darwin little aircraft wild pick them up in Darwin and bring them to the rest of Australia. Then he got the contract to actually bring the mail all the way and he got government support to make it an international airline.
Before too long, Quantas in the nineteen thirties was making international flights.
How long would it have taken to get them?
Well, several days, yeah, and how dangerous, very dangerous yea. And Hudson Fish risked his life many many times to get that little airline going. And you know, Quatus has been very controversial the last few years. They had a managing directors making millions and millions of dollars. Hudson Fish for ten years lived in a house with a tin roof in Long Reach, was hotter than hell. And every set he made out of the airline he poured back into it. So I was very very pleased with Hudson Fish.
But I love it.
It's called Hudson Fish. Fish is spelled fysh. Yeah. But you know, a Nick Kellerman, what an amazing woman. I was so proud to tell her story as well.
Great chat gradly, thank you for coming in and made the book go well.
All the best My pleasure Thank you very much for having me corner.
Antley Keyser, the author of Annette Kellerman Australian Mermaid, and lots of other books about Australian Thank you so much for joining us,