SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR A pseudonym often an advantage

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33044, 11 October 1972, Page 7

SYDNEYSIDE WITH JANET PARR A pseudonym often an advantage

The case for the durable pseudonym is hard to fault. Generations of the lovelorn and the out-of-luck, for instance, can turn for help to “Miss Lonelyhearts” never realising that over the years Miss L. may have been Miss Bloggs, Mrs Sloggs, and Mr Cloggs. The actual optic orbs of television critic, “Square Eyes,” may well have ranged in colour from blue to amber. And all those ladies of the milk tins, the flour packets, and the soap detergent containers may really be a positive but fluctuating battery of typists and clerks busily engaged in sending off recipes for milk and flour and advice on the best way to do the laundry. The greatest recommendation of the enduring pseudonym is, of course, its economy. It saves a lot of messing about. You don’t have to be constantly advising people that Miss Jones was doing all sorts of things for them last week has had a windfall legacy from her aunt gone off to see the world, and in future Mrs Bones will take care of them.

It presents a much better image, too. “Miss Muffet” cares and goes on caring about you come rain, shine, or outsize spiders. Caring about YOU rather than being, apparently, quite happy to ditch you at the faintest call of the wild or the beckoning peal of the wedding bell. MISS TRAVAIRES All these reflections came about because I have just discovered that today there are four Miss Travaires, no less, in Australia. Or, to be strictly accurate, perhaps not in Australia quite as much as Miss Travaires used to be. Miss Carol Travaire, who heads the team, says that there is not much new for their customers to see in Australia these days, or at least not in comfort. The Miss Travaires—should that be Misses Travaires? — work for an Australian airline. Their name is taken from the phrase "travel by air” and they adopt it as their collective surname after their own first names. They work as leaders of tours organised by the airline and between them have clocked up thousands and thousands of miles of travel.

But what happened, I wonder, to the first Miss Travaire whose name was Ann, and who back in 1957 was preparing to lead the first allwomen tour to the “Dead Heart?” Somewhere, I still have one of her introduction cards printed and bordered in an attractive French blue but I think I have lost her comprehensive lists of what to pack although in clothes I remember that it worked from the skin up and it seemed that, for the women who went, humping the bluey around Central Australia was not going to be all that Spartan. Since then, the assorted Misses Travaire have led other parties, which included men, and pioneered various high spots of present-day Australian tourism such as the Barrier Reef and Western Australia’s Kimberley Ranges. But for the past four years, apparently they have not toured in Australia but exclusively further afield—to places such as New Guinea and Timor. These places Miss Carol Travaire is quoted as saying “actually have better

facilities” than many Australian tourist spots. “There isn’t any accommodation for a tour like ours. There are no buses, and you can’t take people around on a truck.” It was an opinion which, as you might suppose, met something of a mixed reception from certain sections of the Australian tourist industry. There has also been something of a mixed reception for Sydney’s newest arrival on the pseudonym scene — Miss Elizabeth Martin.

She has just started applying what is known as “the feminine touch” to the operations of a bank whose head office is — you might have guessed — in Martin Place and not 100 miles from Elizabeth Street.

Her services are strictly at the disposal of women who can telephone a given number and ask for “Miss Martin,” who with 17 years of service with the bank behind her is pretty well qualified to help. If she cannot settle their problems in a straightforward way, she passes them on to a bank officer who can. “Miss Martin” — in reality Miss Jane Pidoux — is Sydney’s first woman-to-woman advisory bank officer, although some Melbourne banks have been offering a similar service for some time.

The Sydney appointment has not been entirely without critics, mainly from women who feel that they are competent enough to iook after their own banking affairs and that if a “feminine” touch was to be applied it might have been done by way of making it easier for a woman on her own to finance a mortgage, for instance. But according to “Miss Martin,” many women are pretty scared of their bank managers, have no idea of finance, and do not like showing their ignorance in front of bank men. In the

first two days she was installed in her comfortable fourth-floor office, "Miss Martin” says she was "flooded” with calls, mostly from single girls and widows who wanted advice about loans. This was advice that Miss Pidoux was probably well suited to give. Her previous job with the bank was as a loans officer. Before that, she had been a shorthand . typist, ledger keeper, machinist, and teller. As far as can be ascertained, no other bank in Sydney is thinking of offering a similar service. “EMILY” I don’t think any other Building Society is proposing to find itself an “Emily,” either. "Emily” — we only see her in pictures — is pleasant faced and of rather indeterminate age, not very young, certainly not old. She looks a nice, pleasant, you-and-me sort of person. “Emily” has a freightload of information to give away in the shape of kits telling how you can put your money into the Building Society and what you can expect from the deal. But “Emily” is a fairly simple sort of symbol. At least one woman financial writer in Sydney has found it harder to come to terms with the concept of “Elizabeth Martin,” seeing it as a “segregated customer service —- the feminine touch all right but, sadly, the bankers are probably hardly aware of just how patronising it is.”