My first blog post is dedicated to my father, Bill Rodie – a feature writer and all round Sydney newspaperman, later to become one of the city’s 1st PR consultants. Originally from New Zealand, Bill worked for a number of newspapers including Smith’s Weekly, and was great friends with poet Kenneth Slessor.
To quote George Blaikies’ book, Remember Smith’s Weekly, “Rodie, before coming to Smith’s, had been a romantic adventurer from New Zealand, who had wandered the South Seas with Errol Flynn, pursuing a try anything once policy. Four white dots under his right eye showed where the prongs of a fork had hit bone when the wielder had intended to drive them through his eye. In the depths of the depression he took a job as a footman in Government House, Sydney, and on leaving, wrote a cheerful series of articles about hard times in the palace.”
At a time when culinary advice came from the Country Women’s Association and a roast leg of lamb was about the best you could expect in many households (still is really…) Bill was a gourmet who loved to cook and a wine connoisseur before it was fashionable.
Ted Moloney’s “Oh For a French Wife” cookbook came out in the late 1950’s – long before our own blockbuster reality cooking shows. My mother and father spent their honeymoon with Maurice OShea, creator and founder of McWilliam’s Mount Pleasant, Lovedale.
I didn’t meet Bill. Well I did but I was a baby. Wish i had. I think we may have been alike in some ways. This blog is dedicated to you dad! And to my son Max, my other role model.
Hi, this is a comment.
To delete a comment, just log in, and view the posts’ comments, there you will have the option to edit or delete them.
I reallly would like to be in touch with you. You may know that my grandmother Florence Rodie of Wellington gave your father and his family a place to live after the Napier Earthquakes. Bill never forgot her kindnesses and offer her his home when he was away from Sydney following the WW2 I would like to know where his home was in the late 1940s?
Hi Vickie,
You can email me at rodiecommunications@gmail.com about this.
Simon Rodie