Silent Witnesses - Adelaide's Statues and Monument Chapter 46
Roy “Mo” Rene
Location
Southern pavement, Hindley Street at intersection with Bank Street.
Description
Life size figure in vaudeville guise, striking a rollicking pose on the pavement, knees bent and hands in pockets.
Unveiled 4th March 2010
At a meeting on the 27th August 2007 the Adelaide City Council requested advice from their expert committee regarding “the commissioning and installation in Hindley Street of a statue of the late Roy Rene…..commemorating his birth” in the street. The genesis of the request was a letter from the Hon Bob Such in July 2007, but popular ABC radio presenter Peter Goers championed the proposal long before.
“Mo” was a hero of the radio generation. Few in the digital age would have heard his voice, and only a radio aficionado would have been aware that he was born in Adelaide on 15th February 1891. The connection is tenuous. His family moved to Melbourne when he was 11 or 12, but in his rambling memoirs he talks fondly of his Adelaide childhood. Born Harry van der Sluys, one of seven children, his father owned a cigar shop in Hindley Street, and the family lived on the premises.
“My stage career started in the backyard when I was eight or nine. With other kids, I used to run a circus or penny concert every Saturday afternoon”. His first “professional” job was singing for prizes, “ten bob or a duck”, at the Central Market on a Friday night, but his first stage appearance was just up the road at the Theatre Royal as a boy soprano. His stage name was “little Roy”, metamorphosing to “Boy Roy”, but his career began in earnest in Sydney when he adopted the stage name “Roy Rene” in 1910. The name was chosen for him by the secretary of the local actors association after an apocryphal “French clown”. Roy was taken with his French provenance - “I always pronounce the second ‘e’ because it is a French name.”
National success arrived with the risqué duo “Stiffy and Mo”, but reached a much larger audience with the radio show “McCacKie Mansion” in the late 1940s. His blackface caricature was known to every war generation Australian, and only his relatively early death in 1954 prevented his annunciation in the television age.
“Mo’s” true memorial is in the National Sound Archive, but this remarkable statue successfully engages the public. South Australian artist Robert Hannaford chose the pavement site and the open pose to tempt passersby to link arms with the merry entertainer and laugh their way through the day.
We can thank the Public Art Round Table for affirming the memorial proposal. Formed in 2005 as part of a plan to “create an engaging and vibrant environment for people who live, work and visit in the city”, the expert committee envisaged a “boulevard of commemoration of important SA artists” such as Robert Helpman and Colin Thiele. To date, only the radio star has strutted the pavement, primarily due to the cost. The Adelaide City Council approved $180 000 for the project, with just over half coming from a South Australian government arts grant.
The statue was cast at Hannaford’s Riverton studio.
It was unveiled by the Lord Mayor, Michael Harbison, during the Adelaide Festival of 2010, attracting an audience of local entertainers.
References
Adelaide City Council Archives, File Nos 2007/131774, 2007/01747
Rene Roy, Mo’s Memoirs Melbourne 1945