I'm assuming that some people will be curious about
the name I have chosen for my site - Tarzan in Terror Orstralis.
I was trying to 
convey
two things. Firstly, that I'm an Australian Tarzan fan.
I also wanted to capture some of that Burroughsian mystique of the lost
world. Most Australians will probably make the connection immediately,
but elsewhere only students of history and well-read travellers are
likely to get the gag. The spelling is also a mild barb at the
quaint Australian pronunciation.
During the Renaissance the good folk of Europe believed that there existed
a great unknown southern continent, an idea that they had inherited
from antiquity. Instinctively, they just couldn't stomach the
idea that there was nothing there, and they experienced an uneasy desire
to place something solid amidst the vast waters south of the Tropic
of Capricorn. There was also a widely-circulated theory that there
must be a land mass large enough to balance the weight of the northern
continents to prevent the world from turning upside down. On maps
this mythical supercontinent was usually designated Terra Australis
Incognita. On this famous map by the Dutch cartographer, Abraham
Ortelius (1527-1598) (right), a large unknown land mass is shown in
the Southern Hemisphere. It is labeled "Terra Australis Nondum
Cognita", or Unknown South Land. Needless to
say, they were also hoping that this great south land would be full
of delightful stuff that would make them all wealthy. (Hale)
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In true Burroughsesque style the mariners of the time believed that if they crossed the equator their ships would burn up, that their vessels would be attacked by huge sea monsters, that they would be sucked to the watery depths by the "maelstrom", a giant whirlpool in the mid-Atlantic, and that if they landed on some foreign shore cannibalistic giants with two heads would eat them alive. It is hardly surprising that it took them so long to get around to discovering Australia. The size of the ghost continent gradually contracted as the trading voyages of Spanish and Portuguese sailors, the two dominant powers in the Southern Hemisphere, reached further afield and eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope. By the time James Cook set sail in 1768 successive explorations had confirmed Terra Australis to a location somewhere south of latitude 50°, somewhere east of Africa and somewhere west of Cape Horn. His voyages on the Endeavour, and later on the Resolution, gave the myth of Terra Australis its death blow. He did prove that there was a gigantic southern continent, but it was much smaller than previously thought, it lay south of 60°, and it was a frozen wasteland. Someone back home thought that one of the places Cook stopped at on his trip would make a nice penal colony and 150 years later they built some picture shows there and began to show Tarzan movies. (Hale) |
| • John Farrow,
one of the uncredited directors of the badly butchered Tarzan film,
Tarzan
Escapes (1936), was born in Sydney in 1904. While working
on the film he fell in love with and soon married the attractive brunette
who was the leading lady. Her name was Maureen
O'Sullivan and they produced a daughter named Mia, who followed
in her mother's thespian footsteps. • Legendary Australian actor Chips Rafferty appeared in two episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan TV series (1966-1968) - Cap'n  Jai
and The Circus.• Less legendary, but highly recognisable, Australian actor Michael Pate appeared in three episodes of the Ron Ely Tarzan TV series (1966-1968) - The Perils of Charity Jones Parts 1 & 2 and Tiger, Tiger. The former, a double episode, was edited into a film called Tarzan and the Perils of Charity Jones and was given theatrical release in Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, and possibly some other countries. It was not released theatrically in English speaking countries to the best of my knowledge, and therefore is not listed amongst the 50 Tarzan films examined on my Tarzan Films pages. • Well known Australian actor Charles "Bud" Tingwell appeared in one of the top four Tarzan films ever made - Tarzan the Magnificent (1960). He played the role of Conway the disgraced doctor who must save the sick child of a native chief. The other three top Tarzan films are Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), Tarzan and His Mate (1934), and Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959). • As kids, most of us Tarzan fans would read a lot of comics featuring Tarzan-inspired  jungle
heroes, with Kaänga usually coming in as a close second behind
Tarzan. I recently learned that one of the other jungle hero
comics that I used to read regularly - Yarmak, Jungle King
- was a purely Australian creation. Yarmak was published
monthly by Youngs Merchandising Co, Sydney between November 1949 to
June 1952, with reprints appearing after that. The character reached
its popularity peak in late 1951. Fortunately, Yarmak was illustrated
by an artist who is now considered the greatest of all Australian
comic artists, Stanley  Pitt.
Pitt was born at Rozelle, an inner western suburb of Sydney,
on 2 March 1925. A gifted illustrator as a child, he became
captivated by the work of comics legend Alex
Raymond in his teens and devoted a considerable amount of time
studying Raymond's style. He began copying the Raymond Sunday
strips and later by attempting to create original work in a similar
style. He succeeded brilliantly and his beautifully detailed,
crisp, fine-lined style owes a lot to his mentor. In a 1976 interview
when asked what his own favourite strip was Pitt replied, "Yarmak.
I never really got around to putting any really fine work into
it, but I had a lot of fun." Yarmak was inked by three
of Pitt's friends - Paul Wheelahan and the brothers, Frank and Jay
Ashley. Frank Ashley also wrote many of the Yarmak stories,
as did Pitt's brother, Reg. Stanley Pitt, who was photographed
in 1976 holding a treatment of his famous Gully Foyle sci-fi
strip (above), is now 77 and lives in suburban Sydney. (Ryan, Shiell
& Snowden) To see an example of a page from one of Pitt's
Yarmak comics, and some other examples of Yarmak covers,
click HERE.• And lastly (my pièce de resistance) is the fact that the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, visited Sydney in the summer of 1942. ERB, never one to sit around and miss any fun, especially of a military nature, volunteered his services as a war correspondent to the US Army during World War II. He was 67 years old, and had the distinction of being the oldest war correspondent in the US Army at the time. Ed was such a celebrity that high ranking officers would carry his bags and invite him to parties wherever he went in the Pacific. On 5 December 1942 Burroughs boarded a B-24 and headed for New Caledonia, via Canton Island and Fiji. After a brief stop in New Caledonia he arrived in Sydney, Australia where he spent the better part of three weeks "towning around with various uniformed cronies" (Taliafero). Everyone wanted to have a drink  with
him. Amid the barhopping he found time to attend to some ERB
Inc business, which the war had hurt badly. Paper rationing
had forced the company to stop publishing books, and a number of newspapers
had eliminated Tarzan from their trimmed down comic sections.
Another problem caused by the war concerned the difficulties
in collecting overseas royalties. More than three thousand dollars
in Tarzan radio-show royalties had been frozen in a Sydney account
since Australia's entrance into the war in 1939. Ed vowed he
would not leave without his money and on 9 January 1943 he succeeded
in converting the overdue and sorely needed funds into US War Bonds.
While he was in town MGM's Australian executives gave ERB a
special screening of Tarzan's
New York Adventure (1942), the sixth and last of the MGM Weissmuller
films. MGM asked Ed to help promote the film and set up a number
of print, radio, and newsreel interviews, which he supposedly handled
with the aplomb of a visiting statesman. On 10 January 1943
he flew back to New Caledonia to resume his coverage of army activities.
In a future version of this page I hope to include some examples
the newspaper stories about Ed Burrough's trip to Sydney. (Taliafero) |
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SOURCES |
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• Age of Exploration, by John R Hale,
1966, Time-Life International |
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This independent, fan-based analysis of the Tarzan material is copyright © 2002-2007 Paul Wickham