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The sterling silver Centenary of Melbourne
Birthday Clock Cake, James W. Steeth & Son,
1934
in sterling silver and silver gilt featuring five tiers with
candles, kangaroo and emu emblems, a clock mechanism
with an enamel dial with hour markings reading
BIRTHDAY CAKE, and featuring the female figures of
Peace and Prosperity and gold boomerang hands, with
engraved plaque to the ebonised base CENTENARY
OF MELBOURNE 1834-1934, the first tier featuring a
gilt map of Victoria and the wording SUPPLIED BY THE
MYER EMPORIUM LTD. MELBOURNE, and engraved
verso, J W STEETH & SON, MAKERS, ARCO HOUSE
MELBOURNE, each tier and and various components
marked sterling
46cm high, 33cm diameter (ebonised base)
4.5kg silver weight (approx)
$30,000–50,000
The Centenary of Melbourne Birthday Cake Clock, 1934
In 1934-35 Melbourne marked its centenary year with
great aplomb with John Batman’s much lauded 1835 diary
entry: ‘This will be the place for a village’, providing the
springboard for nearly a year of events and pageantry.
Victoria and Melbourne, along with the rest of the country,
was reeling from the devastating effects of the Great
Depression, (in 1933 one in three breadwinners was
unemployed), but the appointed Centenary Celebrations
Council clearly relished presenting Melbourne as a city of
growth, prosperity and modernity. Some 300 centenary
events ran from October 1934 to June 1935 including a
Royal tour by Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester whose
speech to formally open the Centenary firmly cemented
ties between Victoria’s settlement and the founding
of Melbourne with Empire; an International Centenary
Air Race sponsored by Macpherson Robertson, of
chocolate making renown; a splendid Centenary People’s
Fair, ‘Joyland’, on Batman Avenue on the banks of the
Yarra; the baking of a gigantic birthday cake, and; the
Centenary All-Australian Exhibition, events showcasing
the endeavour, ‘happiness’ and progress of the city
of one million people.
The Centenary Birthday cake was a spectacle. A fruit
cake of five tiers, weighing an extraordinary 10 tons and
comprising 36 000 eggs, 1½ tons each of sugar and butter,
4 ½ tons of mixed fruit and other ‘all Australian’ ingredients
it was enthusiastically reported as the world’s largest cake
ever made, baked by confectioner George Rath, of the
Astoria café in Swanston Street. Contemporary accounts
note that following the official cutting of the cake, some
250 000 slices were wrapped, decoratively tinned and sold
for one shilling to benefit various charities. For a lucky few,
a gold sovereign was included with 100 of the packages.
The cake was displayed in ‘The Birthday Cake Building’,
unsurprisingly a multi-tiered cake shaped pavilion several
storeys high in ‘Joyland’, which also offered a refreshment
hall and a Dance Palais for patrons.
The five tiers of the Centenary cake were replete with
symbolism. A booklet published for the People’s Fair,
‘Souvenir of Victoria’s Centenary Birthday cake’, loosely
and fancifully chronicled the history of the State of Victoria
and Melbourne, ‘as told by the cake’. Fair attendees were
encouraged to enter the Cake Competition, collecting
coupons to put into their souvenir booklets in the hope
of winning a monetary prize. First prize, valued at 500
pounds, was a solid silver Birthday Cake Clock replicating
the splendid edible centenary cake.
We know two versions of the cake exist, one small and
one large. Both Birthday Cake Clocks, commissioned
and supplied by the Myer Emporium, were fabricated by
James Steeth and Son, notable Melbourne silversmiths
and makers of the Melbourne Cup. The small mantel-piece
sized cake clock, reputedly the competition first prize and
apparently unclaimed, now resides in the collection of the
National Gallery of Victoria, acquired in 1987.
At nearly twice the size of the NGV artefact, we can
postulate that the impressive five tier Cake Clock, now
presented by Gibson’s, was the model reportedly on public
display during the centenary celebrations.
But how this extraordinary Centenary Birthday Cake Clock,
with kangaroo and emu, imaginative depiction of the
treaty between Batman and indigenous peoples, candles,
clock mechanism with the dial depicting the maidens of
Peace and Prosperity, ended up on a far North Queensland
property, ‘out the back of nowhere’ in an old milk crate in a
shed, is a mystery. Reputedly sold by Leonard Joel in 1983
it disappeared into obscurity and was discovered only late
last year. This marvellous confection, a truly important
piece of Melbourne history and an artefact of its time,
has kept its secrets well in the intervening years, and now
rightly deserves its place in a public collection.
Dennice Collett