PHIL JARRATT meets another of Noosa’s living legends.
Quick pub quiz. How many blokes do you know who can not only claim to have met the legendary film star Marlon Brando but to have punched his lights out soon after?
Okay, what about this one – how many blokes do you know who have bought the Noosa post office for $75? Or this – how many blokes do you know who scored a spectacular winning mark at the only Aussie Rules game ever played at the Olympic Games?
Well, unassuming Sunrise Beach retiree Ray Pettigrove did all of these, he’s got the photo albums to prove it and his story has many more unbelievable but true chapters.
Keen readers might remember that a few weeks back we met Noosa cartoonist Graham “Knuckles” Wall, who was once a member of the notorious Boot Hill Gang in Torquay, Victoria. As I concluded my interview with Knuckles I remarked that the Boot Hill lads had remarkable stories. “You should talk to my golfing mate and former Boot Hill member ‘Darkie’ Pettigrove,” Knuckles said. I asked why. “Because he punched out Marlon Brando and ran off with his beautiful Tahitian mistress.”
That wasn’t exactly what happened, but he had me at hello. I sought Ray out, and in the week that Coon cheese was retired, my first question was: “Why do they call you Darkie?”
Ray laughed. “Because I always kept my secrets to myself, particularly in regards to young ladies. I’d keep my mates in the dark. I was discreet about stuff like that.” So we retired that name too, and got on with the Ray Pettigrove story.
Born in Coburg, Melbourne in 1936, Ray started taking family holidays at Torquay, his mother’s birthplace, as soon as the war was over, camping just across the sand from where volunteers were building the first Torquay surf club on the foundations of the wartime gun emplacements. When they were teenagers Ray’s older brother became sweep of the all-conquering Torquay boat crew and together they helped the club to five Victorian titles.
Winter was all about footie, and Ray had talent, playing a couple of seasons with Carlton. When the Olympic Games were held in Melbourne in 1956, he was selected to play for the amateurs versus the pros in a demonstration match at the MCG when his desperate lunge for the line beat St Kilda ruckman Brian Walsh and won the match for the amateurs. “They never forgave us,” Ray chuckles.
But football had to take a back seat when Ray finished his apprenticeship as an electrician and started his own contracting business. He soon had a successful operation and a retail store run by Mum where they sold the first television sets. Lots of them. Then Ray sold for a tidy profit and took off with his mate Nick to follow a dream.
He and Nick booked passage on a French cargo boat bound for Tahiti, stopping at gloriously-isolated islands and atolls to pick up copra for the capitol, and arriving in Papeete just in time for both to get work as extras on the film Mutiny On The Bounty, starring Marlon Brando as the troubled Fletcher Christian. The notoriously difficult actor was apparently in character all the time, making a serial pest of himself jumping through plate glass windows at parties while chasing his beautiful Tahitian co-stars.
One evening while both were dining at separate tables in a restaurant, Ray looked over to see an impossibly beautiful Tahitian girl draping herself over Nick. She was on the run from an angry Brando and within days she had moved in with Nick at the cottage on the edge of town the Aussie lads were renting. Ray had been spearfishing with some locals and stopped at the pub on the way home, so he was fearless when he arrived home to find Brando revving his motor bike out front and hurling abuse at the frightened girl who was cowering inside.
“I told him to bugger off,” Ray recalls, “And he came towards me threateningly, so I snotted him good and hard, he fell over his bike and it landed on him. He picked himself up and roared off into the night and never came back.”
Ray had his own Tahitian love affair, resulting in a daughter he remains close to, but the high seas beckoned, and, working first as a cook, then crewing as a sailor, Ray spent the next couple of years sailing the world and visiting exotic ports, eventually washing up in Sausalito, California, where he sold yachts and met his first wife, Frieda. After a honeymoon touring the Outback, they settled in Torquay for a while, and began to hear stories about a magical place up north called Noosa Heads.
Says Ray: “My old Boot Hill mate Mumbles Walker came back and said he’d just bought a motel there and the place was sensational, so I built a camping body on the tray of the ute and we took off.” Ray fell in love with the town instantly, and land was cheap so he bought two blocks at Sunshine Beach for $500 each. Some time later he noticed an ad in a real estate window for a house available for removal. He made enquiries and found it was the Noosa Heads post office across the street. It was listed for $1200 but the agent said he’d take $75 cash if Ray could move the place in a hurry.
The post office was moved to one of the Sunshine Beach blocks and Ray and Frieda built a modern beach house around the historic core. It’s still there today, a brightly-painted backpackers at the corner of Duke and Douglas.
Although the adventures continued, including two divorces, another successful boat-broking stint in California and plenty of exotic travel, Noosa remained home base. With second wife the “Polish Princess”, Ray opened La Petite Bistro on Hastings Street, sold real estate to high flyers from Sydney and Melbourne (“One Sydney bookmaker bought three places from me in one week, using a different name for each,” he recalls. “Noosa was a good place to hide money in those days.”) and managed Netanya Noosa for six years in its early days.
These days the 84-year-old is loving the retired lifestyle with partner Gayna, playing golf a couple of times a week, working out in his home gym and fishing off his boat with family and friends. The sporting genes run strongly through the generations. Son Max was a champion ironman who remains a surf club stalwart, while grandson Maverick is a star with the Noosa Tigers.
“Why would you live anywhere else?” asks Ray, putting away the scrapbooks of his amazing life and heading out for a session on his backyard putting green.
