Sir William Gaston Walkley collection of aggregated records

fonds

1958-1973

Textual Records, Clippings, Nonmusical Sound Recordings, Photographs, Manuscript Cartographic Materials

9661056

1.10 metres of textual material (6 boxes), including audiocassettes/tapes and 1 out size box

Sir William Gaston Walkley (1896-1976), businessman, was born on 1 November 1896 at Otaki, New Zealand, son of London-born parents Herbert Walkley, draper, and his wife Jessie Annie, née Gaston

In February 1921 Walkley was admitted as an associate of the New Zealand Society of Accountants. About 1922 he opened an accountancy practice at Hawera, the centre of a rich farming district. He sat on the local borough council between 1925 and 1935. At Hawera he met William Arthur O'Callaghan, an accountant and motorcar-dealer twenty years his senior. By the end of the 1920s O'Callaghan presided over the North Island Motor Union. He recruited Walkley as its secretary. Motorists complained that foreign oil companies set the price of petrol. Ostensibly to bring down prices, O'Callaghan and Walkley helped to form the Associated Motorists' Petrol Co. Ltd in 1931, selling under the Europa brand-name. During the summer of 1935-36 Walkley sold his practice at Hawera and settled in Sydney as the A.M.P.Co.'s general manager

During World War II Walkley served on the Oil Advisory Committee and the board of Pool Petroleum Pty Ltd, both of which supervised the distribution of petrol. He came in touch with Federal politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists, particularly with Sir George Wales of the Alba Petroleum Co. of Australia Ltd, a Melbourne-based firm with a small market in Tasmania and South Australia. In 1943 Walkley and Wales travelled to the U.S.A. to arrange for supplies of cheap Middle East oil through the California Texas Oil Co. Ltd. The A.M.P.Co. bought out Alba amicably in 1945. The company changed its name to Ampol Petroleum Ltd in 1949

To be successful, sponsorship required publicists. Walkley courted the media and used charter flights to ferry journalists around the nation to special business and sporting occasions. He enjoyed the conviviality of these gatherings, and the goodwill that flowed from them. Announcing, shrewdly, that 'in all my experience with journalists I have never had a confidence broken', he had endowed the annual Walkley awards for journalism in 1956, to be administered by the Australian Journalists' Association. He always presented the awards himself and bequeathed $10,000 to the A.J.A. to perpetuate them

Reference:
Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/walkley-sir-william-gaston-11940 (accessed 26 July, 2012)

COLLECTION 1:
Sir William Gaston Walkley papers and photographs, 1920-1969

COLLECTION 2:
Sir William Gaston Walkley sound recordings, 1958-1963