Private Board For 1956 Olympic Games Visitors

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27667, 25 May 1955, Page 11

Private Board For 1956 Olympic Games Visitors

[Australian Information Bureau]

If you are coining to Melbourne for the 1956 Olympic Games, you may be a guest in the house of someone like Mrs Bridget Aird, who lives with her barrister husband and their four young children in a comfortable red brick villa in the suburb of Kew. Around their home runs a tall green cypress hedge bordering the neat lawns and rose beds of the garden. Inside are deep green oarpets, comfortable chairs and gay curtains, and wide windows let in plenty of sunshine. In her kitchen, Mrs Aird has a refrigerator, a stainless steel sink, an electric stove, and a collection of modern labour-saving appliances. She needs them, for her four children are all under 11 and she has *no domestic help. » But she is already planning to take in guests next year. It is her response to a recent broadcast on the subject by the Governor of Victoria (Sir Dallas Brooks), who said: “More than 10,000 overseas visitors are expected to come to Melbourne for the 1956 Games, from November 22 to December 8, and perhaps 20,000 interstate and country visitors as. well.” He explained that Melbourne hotels could not cope with such an influx, so the city would do what Helsinki did during the 1952 Games, what London did during the Coronation, and what Edinburgh does every year at Festival time. Melbourne would place its visitors In private homes. Thousands of Offers Thousands of women like Mrs Aird stepped forward to offer accommodation or wrote privately to friends and relatives overseas inviting them as guests to the 1956 Games. Mrs Aird.will make one room available to an unknown Olympic visitor probably one from Asia. «At Dromana a seaside resort about an hour’s drive from Melbourne, Mr and Mrs Aird have a week-end cottage. They bought it three years ago and have furnished it with a refrigerator, electric stove, comfortable beds and chairs. During the Games it will be available to six visitors. Mrs Aird believes that the Olympic Games are so important to Australia that all of Melbourne must pull together. She also believes that AsianAustralian friendships are so important that she would like to do her small part in cementing them. Mrs Aird is by no means alone in thinking this. Quiet-spoken swimming star, John Marshall, who has set world swimming records at almost every distance from 440 yards to one mile, thinks so, too. He has just returned to Melbourne from four years’ study at Yale University and one year at Harvard. And he has come back convinced that the Olympic Games are one of the strongest forces for international friendship in the world today. “People from 83 countries meet on the sports field during the Games in a spirit of friendship which cuts across all social and national barriers,” he said. “We can all take a lesson from this.” He lives with his father and mother in an attractive home in Brighton, a Melbourne bay-side beach suburb, but will probably marry and move into his own home later this year. He will have visitors from Japan and Mexico during the Games. A few miles along the bay from John Marshall lives an Englishwoman, Mrs C. Naylor. She is one of five sisters who migrated from England to Australia and she hopes she will be able to have Olympic guests from England. She has a big home, with 10 rooms, and she lives within a few minutes of the beach. A few hundred yards away are the vivid lights of St. Kilda, a colourful quarter of European and Chinese restaurants, fun-parlours and theatres, coffee shops and milk bars. All these things Mrs Naylor wants her visitors to see, just

as she wants them to see the beautiful parks and the lovely homes of Melbourne’s luxury suburbs. In one of these suburbs—Toorak—lives Mrs B. B. Marks in a large cream and blue attic villa. It is carpeted throughout, furnished with taste, decorated with collections of delicate china and with paintings of the great Australian outback. Mrs Marks would like Olympic guests in 1956. She is ready to serve and wait on her guests herself. She will entertain them and take them to Melbourne’s beauty spots. If they want privacy |hey will have it; if they want company Mrs Marks will be anxious to hear about their home country. But she has one worry. “I hope my guests don’t expect fancy cooking,” she said, “I run to bacon and eggs, orange juice and coffee at breakfast. Americans or New Zealanders would be happiest at my place.” Close to Mrs Marks liv s Mr Norman Myer, chief of tfie Myer Emporium. largest department store in Australia and one of the greatest in the world. He, too, will have Olympic guests in 1956—three businessmen and their wives from the United Sfates. “The Olympic Games offers me an opportunity of returning some of the wonderful hospitality I’ve received in past years.” Mr Myer said. ‘Tn addition it gives many of my friends an opportunity to make a combined business and pleasure trip to Australia. Many other Melbourne businessmen have invitpd overseas associates to visit them during the Gaines. For example the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce has offered to accommodate other Chamber members from overseas and Melbourne Rotary members will do the same thing.” Supervising the scheme will be the Civic Olympic Committee set up by the Melbourne City Council under the chairmanship of Cr. Maurice A. Nathan. ‘‘We will offer overseas visitors almost every type of accommodation from semi-luxury types to ordinary suburban villas,” Cr. Nathan said. “The system will be basically one of paid accommodation. All homes being offered for overseas visitors are being inspected and graded and priced accordingly. Prices will range from £ 1 a day upwards, for bed and breakfast.”