People Australia

Frank Walford, 1913

Sun (Sydney), 30 October 1913, p 10

Frank Walford (1882-1969) journalist, author, political activist and mayor

Birth: 23 September 1882 at Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales, son of Lion or Leon Henry Walford (1852-1925), customs officer, born at Launceston, Tasmania, and Sydney-born Anna Joyce, née Maides (1855-1916). Marriage: 1912 at Woollahra, Sydney, and 16 November 1916 at All Saints’ Anglican Church, Parramatta, to the same person, Sydney-born Queenie Madge Owen (1892-1953). They had one daughter and one son. Death: 30 May 1969 in his usual residence at Kundibar Street, Katoomba, NSW. Religion: Congregationalist. 

• His father was a descendant of convicts Jane Mulloy and Bernard Walfart known as Walford.
• Frank was educated at Fort Street High School, matriculating in 1898. For the next ten years he worked in numerous jobs, including clerical work in banks, customs department, a shipping line and his own carrying firm, ‘Walford & Walford’. He also claimed to have worked in Northern Australia as a timber getter, mule packer, prospector, drover, alligator hunter, buffalo shooter, kangaroo hunter, orchid collector and pearler.
• Owned a boat and claimed to have engaged in drug smuggling, people smuggling, maiming and killing several people, though accounts may be exaggerated.
• 1909-1910 joined the ALP in the Parramatta district (NSW), being active in the Parramatta Workman’s Institute. Became journalist for the Cumberland Times, as well as a duck farmer and respected boxer.
• ALP candidate for Parramatta in 1913 and 1916; was narrowly defeated. Prominent anti-conscriptionist.
• 1919 moved to the Blue Mountains in NSW and worked as journalist for the Blue Mountains Echo and Smith’s Weekly and later the Katoomba Daily. Fought some 40 libel suits in the course of his controversial career as a journalist.
• Became an energetic advocate of the beauties of the Blue Mountains, making contact with Dr Eric Dark and left-wing group of writers, bushwalkers and rock climbers. Also published poetry in the Bulletin and became an accomplished short story writer (total number 500) and a successful novelist, (fourteen in all) with 20,000 copies of The Indiscretions of Iole being sold in England in 1941.
• Engaged in various business ventures with Dark including Blue Mountains Guide Service and helped develop mountain cave hideaway that became notorious in the Cold War years.
• Ran for local government in 1941, employing a ‘magnificently Walfordian manifesto’, beginning a 25-year stint of uninterrupted, obsessive aldermanic service. He was mayor three times.
• With Dark he joined the Volunteer Defence Corps in the Blue Mountains. His drastic political transformation seems to have been triggered by joining the Guides and Reconnaissance Unit under the charge of the anti-communist William Charles Wentworth. Angered by disruptions caused by strikes on the waterfront when his son was serving with the army in New Guinea, from 1944 he became a fervent anti-communist crusader, attacking former kindred spirits and close personal friends in the press and in broadcasts with vehemence and impunity. The resulting split proved traumatic for the literary careers of all Katoomba-based writers.
• After World War II he devoted his energies to local government issues and his flagging literary career.
• Cause of death: acute myocarditis and chronic myocarditis.

Sources
Jim Smith, ‘The Life of Frank Walford’ in Legends of the Blue Mountains Valleys, Den Fenella Press, Wentworth Falls, 2003; Barbara Brooks (with Judith Clark), Eleanor Dark. A Writer’s Life, Macmillan, Sydney, 1998.