1934
A Cherry Ripe chocolate bar
The age of adventure
The Cherry Ripe is an oblong blend of coconut, cherries and dark chocolate wrapped in a crimson foil package. The Cherry Ripe was unique to Australia when the chocolate bar was launched by MacRobertson’s. It symbolised the entrepreneurial spirit of a young Australia.
At dawn on 20 October 1934, 60 000 people gathered at RAF Mildenhall in East Anglia to watch 20 planes take off in the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. The race, also known as the London to Melbourne Air Race, took place over a distance of 18 200 kilometres. It was watched avidly all around the globe, but especially in Australia, where it was an important step in joining Australia to the rest of the world. At the time only 12 planes had ever flown to Australia.
Billed as ‘The World’s Greatest Air Race’, the event was instigated by Melbourne’s lord mayor, Sir Harold Gengoult Smith, to mark the centenary of the foundation of Victoria. Prize money of £15 000 came from Sir Macpherson Robertson, proprietor of MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works, which was then the largest confectionary business in the Commonwealth.
Robertson was born on 6 September 1859 in Ballarat, Victoria, the eldest of seven children. In 1874 he was apprenticed to the Victoria Confectionery Co. and in 1880 he began making novelty sweets in his bathroom at home in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy and personally hawking them to local shopkeepers.
Taking its name from a combination of its founder’s first and last names, MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works expanded quickly. By the early 1900s, it was a significant player in the competitive Melbourne confectionery market, previously monopolised by English importers. Its signature chocolate brand was Old Gold, and Old Gold chocolate became a key ingredient, along with coconut and cherries, in the Cherry Ripe bar.
Robertson introduced chewing gum and fairy floss to Australia and created a number of iconic Australian sweets, including the Freddo Frog and Snack chocolates. In 1926, he acquired the Life Savers franchise and introduced the Australia-only flavour ‘musk’.
Like some between-the-wars Willy Wonka character, Robertson was always dressed immaculately in white. His Fitzroy complex of white-painted factories housing several thousand white-uniformed employees was known as White City. His delivery trucks were drawn by prize grey draught horses. The business prospered.
In 1926 Robertson established the MacRobertson International Croquet Shield, which remains the premier croquet teams event in the world. It is currently competed for by Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand and the USA. Robertson financed the MacRobertson Round Australia motor truck expedition in 1928, and in the same year founded the MacRobertson-Miller Aviation Co., which serviced Western Australian towns for the next 40 years. The confectioner made substantial gifts to British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic expeditions in 1929 and 1930, and Douglas Mawson named MacRobertson Land in Antarctica in his honour.
Robertson actively promoted his legend as a self-made man, but unlike other industrialists of the period he saw the value in trade unionism. He ran a closed shop and encouraged the Female Confectioners’ Union. During the Depression, he turned off his mechanised factories and went back to manual production lines. In 1934, he gave £146 000 to Melbourne to stimulate the Victorian economy hit by the Depression. The funds were used to build the National Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, a fountain near the Shrine of Remembrance, the MacRobertson Girls’ High School and the Grange Road bridge, known as MacRobertson’s Bridge, over the Yarra River.
The success of Old Gold and the Cherry Ripe funded all kinds of public benefits in the first half of the 20th century. The 1934 MacRobertson Trophy Air Race was organised by the Royal Aero Club in part to help connect Australia to Britain. When the English team of C W A Scott and T Campbell Black landed at Darwin airport, they had clipped four and a half days off the existing UK–Australia record. Despite one faulty engine and a faulty oil-pressure indicator, Scott and Black flew through pylons at Flemington Racecourse in front of 40 000 spectators to claim first place. Their total flying time was two days, 22 hours and 34 minutes.
Second place went to K D Parmentier and J J Moll of the Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM). Towns all across Australia had been alerted to look out for aircraft in difficulty, and when the KLM plane was lost in a thunderstorm and blown off course near Albury in New South Wales, the locals came to the rescue. In gratitude, KLM made a large donation to Albury Hospital, and Alf Waugh, the mayor of Albury, was awarded a title in Dutch nobility.
The MacRobertson Trophy Air Race marks the beginning of serious aviation in Australia. The Queensland regional air service was about to become Qantas, the Royal Flying Doctor Service was about to start, and commercial airlines began to look at Australia as part of their global network.
And while MacRobertson’s Steam Confectionery Works was acquired by Cadbury in 1967 and then merged with Schweppes Australia in 1969, Australians today still enjoy Robertson’s Cherry Ripe bar.