Signs of the times: the stories behind Australia’s biggest and best-loved billboards
One of Sydney’s most renowned signs – and the largest billboard in the country – has received a makeover to mark its 50th anniversary. At 41 metres wide and 13 metres high, the Coca-Cola sign at Kings Cross presides over one of Sydney’s busiest thoroughfares, William Street, and has widely been regarded as the gateway to the inner city enclave since it was the epicentre of Sydney’s bohemia in the 1970s.
The world’s most popular carbonated beverage (the estimated worth of the brand is more than US$33.17bn) is still going strong after more than 140 years. But other distinctly Australian household brands – and their enduring advertising symbols – date back even further.
Here is the story behind some of Australia’s best-known advertising signs.
Arnotts
William Arnott, a Scottish immigrant, opened his first Australian bakery in Morpeth, New South Wales, almost four decades before Coca-Cola was invented. His subsequent bakery in Newcastle morphed into a national biscuit manufacturing company that would stay under the control of the Arnott family for more than a century – and a further 22 years as a wholly Australian owned company – before major US shareholder the Campbell Soup Company executed a takeover in 1997.
The same year, Arnott’s closed its main factory in North Strathfield, just north of the railway bridge which had been unofficially known as “the Arnott’s bridge” since the company erected its first prominent Sydney signage there in the 1930s.
The location was an advertiser’s dream. Travelling up Parramatta Road, the enticing aroma of freshly baked biscuits wafted into motorists’ nostrils just as they approached the sign. The bridge now sits on the state heritage register.
Skipping Girl Vinegar
Nostalgic Melburnians hold a special place in their heart for Abbotsford’s Little Audrey, the skipping girl thought to be Australia’s first animated neon sign in Australia.
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Born in 1936, Little Audrey’s life was cut short at the age of 32 by the demolition company Whelan the Wrecker, founded by Jim Whelan, who was known as “the most destructive man in Melbourne” due to his company demolishing many of the city’s original grand buildings in the late 19th century. Skipping Girl’s lights had been switched off when the company that made the vinegar, Nycander & Co, was taken over in the mid 1960s. When Whelan pulled the factory down in the late 60s, Little Audrey disappeared.
Within a few years a replica had been created. Her reincarnation was installed on the roof of a nearby electroplating factory by the business’s owner, Jack Benjamin, who had led the call for her reinstatement. By the turn of the century, Little Audrey had been placed on the national trust and Victorian heritage registers.
The Nylex Clock
The artist who designed Little Audrey in the 1930s, Jim Minogue, would go on to create another major Melbourne sign almost three decades later.
The Nylex Clock, perched atop malting storage silos in Cremorne since 1961, also now has heritage status. Presiding high over the Yarra River and the Monash Freeway, the clock informed Melburnians of the time and temperature for 48 years. Then Nylex went into receivership.
Today, the silos are scrawled in graffiti and the clock on top cuts a grim, unlit silhouette on the dusk city skyline. It was briefly lit up in 2015 when a group calling themselves the Nylex Clock Collective broke into the silos and flicked the clock’s switch back on. They failed to take into account that, in the height of summer, it was daylight saving time.
The future of the silos, built in the 1880s, and the Nylex Clock, remain uncertain.
The Pink Poodle
One of the Gold Coast’s ubiquitous high rises now stands on Fern Street where the oh-so-60s neon lit pink poodle once pranced. The motel it advertised disappeared more than 20 years ago but the poodle, with a bit of a makeover, lives on, led further down the street and these days under the protection of the Gold Coast local heritage register.
The Pink Poodle Motel was a popular honeymoon destination in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, and its neon sign came to represent all the kitsch glamour and glitz the Gold Coast had to offer.
Dingo Flour
The Dingo sign on the heritage-listed flour mill in North Fremantle has long outlived the product it was advertising. The distinctive stylised red dingo appeared some two decades after the mill’s construction in 1922, and contrary to popular myth, it was not originally painted by Alan Bond.
Local graphic artist Les Nash painted the original for £40 sterling in 1940, only to have it painted over shortly afterwards – it had already become too recognisable a landmark for second world war enemies. Bond’s first wife, Eileen “Big Red” Bond insists her ex-husband was indeed responsible for the logo’s restoration in the 1950s, when he worked as an apprentice with Perth’s Parnell Signs.
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“Of course it’s true, we all knew he did it,” she told the West Australian in 2022. “Alan always did a lot of moonlighting and he was always up on scaffolding trying to paint anything he could get his hands on to get some money. I really don’t know why people would deny it, there is nothing to doubt.”
Is Don, Is Good
Long before silo art became a thing in Victoria, Melbourne commuters had come to love the “Is Don. Is Good” logo painted on the towering structures in Laurens Street, North Melbourne. Anyone over the age of 30 will associate the giant message with the 1990s ads featuring Scottish-born actor Tommy Gibson Dysart – of Homicide, Cop Shop and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo fame – posing as an Italian godfather figure.
According to Melbourne foodie Jan O’Connell, author of Australian Food Timeline, the company, founded in a post-second world war Melbourne coming to terms with continental cuisine, took its name from the last three letters of the suburb Essendon, where one of its butchers shops was located – and not, as many Melburnians believe, in honour of Australia’s greatest batsman, Donald “The Don” Bradman.
The current silo design, with the figure of a happy butcher added to the giant salami sticks painted in 2001, was updated in 2014.
Chesty Bonds
The old Bond’s factory in Camperdown is now the Sydney Nursing School but, like the famous singlet brand, the company’s mascot lives on.
The now heritage-listed symbol began life in 1940 as a newspaper advertising cartoon, representing Australian manliness while flogging underwear and entertaining readers of the Sun, the Argus and the Times until the 1960s.
Chesty’s creators Syd Miller and Ted Moloney, working for the J Walter Thompson advertising agency, used the face of Depression-era NSW premier Jack Lang as the inspiration for the heroic character who took on superhero abilities while wearing his athletic singlet.
AWA Tower
The thrill of new technology arriving in Australia in the early 1900s is epitomised by this art deco structure, which remained Sydney’s tallest tower until the 1960s.
Amalgamated Wireless Australia (AWA) became Australia’s first manufacturer of commercial radios in the 1920s.
In 1939, AWA opened its new headquarters in York Street, crowning a building inspired by Paris’s Eiffel Tower with an imposing 46m transmission beacon which still stands today. When television was introduced to Australia, the company marked its foray into this new technology by adding neon lighting.
The neon is long gone and the tower itself was demolished in the 1990s before being rebuilt and placed on the New South Wales State heritage register.
