Sydney’s Royal Easter Brings City a Glimpse Of Australian Outback

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27059, 19 April 1949, Page 5

Sydney’s Royal Easter Brings City a Glimpse Of Australian Outback

Long Delays

From Cedric R. Mentiplay, Special Australian Correspondent, NZPA SYDNEY, Apl. 13. Its Show time again in Sydney! Suddenly, almost overnight, the streets of Sydney are peopled with wide-hatted, easy-walking individuals, each one of whom appears to be chewing an invisible grassstalk. A whiff of the outback blows into the big city, causing the pentup workaday inhabitants of the metropolis to sigh wistfully and drift off into nostalgic dreams of rolling downlands and wide-open spaces.

The dreams provoke a practical reaction. In their thousands, Sydneysiders and others from all over Australia make for that hallowed area which lies a scant section and a-half by bus or tram 'from the heart of Sydney. For the traditional nine days all the resources of the great island continent are on display, concentrated into a few noisy, glittering, footsore acres, and everyone can indulge his boyhood ambition of being a boundary rider, a wealthy squatter or the presiding genius of some mechanical marvel.

The Royal Easter Show is an amalgamation of several identifiable elements welded into something which at times baffles description. First of all it is a shop window for everything Australia and the rest of the world has to offer the average Australian. Secondly, it is a show place for the best in primary production, from sheep and pigs to the majestic, slowmoving Aberdeen Anguses and Clydesdales and the geometrically piled masses of fruit, vegetables, cereals and dairy produce which make up the district exhibits. Thirdly, in the magnificence of its grand parades, its horsemanship and wood chopping events, its wisely nimble sheep dogs and the blaring cacaphony of sideshow alley, it is partly “ outback ” carnival and partly three-ring circus. i Everyone Goes

Everyone, goes to the show. In the first three days this year 224.827 people poured through the turnstiles and distributed themselves through the halls of industry and manufacture, the beckoning amusement. stalls and the spreading expanse of the stands. The show can take them all, and more, even though it is becoming woefully crowded in its strategic position and building restrictions still hamper further construction. This year, aided by perfect weather, officials expect that another record of attendance will be created to go with those more embarrassing records in numbers of entries.

Year after year the greatest problem of the officials has been what to leave out. Standards have been raised and

mediocrity eliminated, but still the entries grow. Last year the show lost a pavilion by fire —a loss which at present cannot be replaced. This year one of the biggest remaining pavilions was still piled high with wool when the show opened, due to a strike of storemen and packers. Nevertheless, the show went on—and the entries swelled again. Fifty years ago there were 3982 entries. This year there are 22,848 —just 7000 more than in the first year of the war. Big Business

For nine days it is the biggest of big business. Salesmen are handicapped almost as much as in the immediate pre-war years because of production difficulties, but nevertheless a million pounds’ worth of orders will be taken. Showground branches of banks are handling anything from £50.000 to £IOO.OOO every day. mostly in silver. Numerous firms selling anything from motor cars and tractors to agricultural machinery, farm equipment and household furnishings finds it a most profitable venture to erect elaborate permanent buildings outside the pavilions in order to display their wares for just nine days of the year. Through this melee of gleaming exhibits and displays, mothers haul children, small boys haul mothers, and bereft families search for offspring. Sometimes father is jnissing, too, for there are nine bars in the showgrounds —and this year, at least, there is no beer strike. On the first day nearly 60,000 gallons of beer filtered down parched gullets, and there was no arrest for drunkenness.

Sample Bags

The grand search, as far as the small fry are concerned, is for the sample bag. It is a tradition of the show that even in times of the acutest shortage these stout paper bags liberally debaubed with advertisements should be on sale. Some say they used to be given away, together with the varied products inside them. To-day, however, it is a lucky parent who finds he ,or she has to pay only a shilling for a bag. The average collection of a dozen assorted bags would cost well over a pound—which means that a family man’s visit to the show is likely to prove even more expensive than a trip to Randwick. Some stall managers gave tongue dolefully after the first day of the show to the effect that people were becoming more careful of how they spenL their money. “ They're even looking inside the sample bags this year,” gloomed the manager of a chocolate exhibit. “ Before the war people would buy a bag even if it contained dirt.” This, of course, could mean one of two things—either a tightening of purse-strings, or a glimpse of the writing on the wall for certain manufacturers who in previous shows made a handsome profit by selling their “ samples ” at well above retail rates.

But the sample bag has not quite come into its own again. Some firms still display cards saying that their goods are too scarce for dissipation by sample bags. In the more costly brackets there are long delays between ordering and receiving. In the machinery sections the question is still “ When can I get delivery? ” rather than “ What is the capacity? ” or “ How does it compare with Blank's product? ” v This is especially true of motor cars and trucks. Though the total exhibits in this section exceed £250,000 in value, only two firms promise anything like quick delivery. Cars are predorhinantly English, because of import prohibitions stemming from the dollar crisis, and two-thirds of them are four-cylinder models of low to medium horsepower. Keen competition and an increasing use of advertising by rival motor firms betoken better times ahead, but nowadays the prospective purchaser must have at least £6OO in his pocket before looking at the least pretentious car. It is usually a collection of footsore and discouraged citizens which arrives at last in the grandstand. The show ring, however, provides the best of tonics, for here, at least, the years have not left their mark. As always, ihis is the heart and bloodstream of “ Sydney Royal.”