In the 15 years following the Second World War, Australia went through a massive cultural shift. What had been a heavily British-influenced society was transformed by the experience of war on its doorstep, and the arrival down under of many thousands of American servicemen. Then in 1956 came television – and with that an overwhelming flood of American programming to add a fresh layer of American cultural influence to the Hollywood movies we’d been digesting for the previous 40 years. With those heavily massaged images of folksy idealism and rootin’ tootin’ western tales came the more subtle and subliminal messages of American consumerism. And that included fast foods.
Let’s not think that that automatically means McDonald’s, KFC or Pizza Hut, or any of the many other brands that today line our major traffic thoroughfares or dot our suburbs. Those were all to become a phenomenon of the late-1960s and beyond. In the mid- and late-1950s, fast food in Australia was fish and chips or a pie or, if you wanted something exotic, a ‘beefburger.
Into this mix, propelled by a wave of popularity for rock ‘n’ roll and all things USA, strode a dapper little American with a big smile, an abundance of confidence and a seemingly endless capacity to bring us the greatest names in the musical world of the day. Lee Gordon lived a wild life, knew all the stars, reportedly slept in a coffin, was married four times and made and lost fortunes. Along the way Gordon’s various entrepreneurial endeavours would have a profound effect on the fabric of Australian life and culture, way beyond anything even he could have foreseen.
What Gordon did was to tap into the core of his native American culture and replicate it in Australia – all in the name of making a buck. He would try anything if he thought he could turn it to advantage: discotheques, gay bars, strip clubs, rock ‘n’ roll concerts and, in 1960, a fast-food chain.
That latter venture was debuted in August, 1960, as a drive-in establishment called Lee Gordon’s Big Boy Beefburgers, on Parramatta Road in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Lewisham (better known as Taverners Hill). It was built on the site of a large two-story mansion at 696 Parramatta Road, just down the road from the elite Fort Street Boys High School and next to a car yard called Astra Car Sales.
It was claimed to be ‘Australia’s first drive-in restaurant, direct from America, even though another American entrepreneur – Robert Griffith – had opened his first drive-in hamburger outlet between Queens Road and the Albert Park Lake in Melbourne the previous January. Gordon’s venture was touted as being the first in a series of 50 such outlets.
Happily stealing ideas and style from the already booming and competitive fast-food market in the USA, Gordon ensured his new venue had a ‘bold skillion roof, tapered eaves, angled struts and a window wall with candy-striped spandrels’ and was a direct copy from McDonald’s outlets in the USA, even though ostensibly designed by a local architect. And the logo for the new restaurant – a chubby paper-hatted child – was a direct steal from the Big Boy burger chain
