Skipping Girl Vinegar might have become one of Australia’s almost-forgotten brands, reduced to a tiny image on Cornwell’s Vinegar labels, were it not for a neon sign that has become a landmark in Melbourne. The illuminated Skipping Girl sits above a heritage-listed building just down the road from where I live, in Abbotsford. My current address – 627 Victoria Street – is where the brand was born.
It was the location of the Shamrock Brewery, a landmark in Victoria Street since the imposing brick structure had replaced the former timber premises in the early 1890s. The brewery was closed in 1907, after a merger that formed Carlton and United Breweries and, in 1910, the Swedish bacteriologist Oscar Nycander leased the building. His initial enterprise was the manufacture of compressed yeast for bread baking. It was a new industry for Australia: before this, bakers had to make their own yeast.
It’s not clear whether Nycander & Co. began making vinegar immediately. The company was certainly producing it by 1914, when Oscar Nycander applied for a 35 per cent duty to be levied on imported yeast. It seems his local baker’s yeast product was struggling to compete on price. The vinegar enterprise flourished, however. Nycander & Co. adopted the Skipping Girl brand, thought to have originated from the skipping rhyme: “salt, vinegar, mustard, pepper, if I dare, I can do better…”. The model for the original logo was 8-year-old Kitty Minogue, whose brother, James, submitted a sketch for a newspaper competition. She later became a Brigidine nun known as Sister Felicitas.
By 1916, Skipping Girl Vinegar was selling for eight pence per gallon in bulk and five shillings bottled, and was advertised as equal to any imported product. During the 1920s, Skipping Girl pure malt vinegar was promoted as ideal for salads, while Cornwell’s Vinegar, also being produced by Nycander at this point, was advertised as the best table vinegar. Oscar Nycander died in 1927, but the company continued in his name, and a 1928 trademark application claimed rights to “A label depicting a girl skipping and having thereon words ‘Skipping Girl’ – Nycander and Co. Pty. Ltd., Abbotsford, Victoria”.
Nycander and Co. purchased the freehold for the Victoria Street building in 1932. In 1936, they erected the famous neon sign, thought to be the first animated neon sign in Victoria. The sign was created by Claude Neon, and the model was Irene Barron, a junior artist for that company. The original skipping girl sign, familiarly known as “Little Audrey”, remained above the premises for more than three decades.
At some point after Oscar Nycander’s death, the ownership of Nycander & Co. passed to their competitor, Mauri Brothers and Thomson. This multi-faceted company was also a yeast manufacturer and had acquired the Sydney-based Cornwell’s malt extract and vinegar business in 1907. Although most accounts suggest Mauri Brothers bought Skipping Girl Vinegar in the 1950s, a brief article in The Sun News-Pictorial in 1938 mentions “Mauri Brothers and Thomson Ltd., Sydney, and their associated houses Harrison San Miguel Pty Ltd and Nycander & Co. Pty Ltd.”
The disappearance of the popular sign provoked a public outcry. As a result, a replica sign was built by Whiteway Neon in 1970 and erected above the Crusader Plate building, a little further down Victoria Street. The sign has since undergone several restorations. It is heritage listed and, since 2008, has been sponsored by the energy company AGL. Little Audrey switched to solar power in 2012.
Mauri Brothers and Thomson was bought by the conglomerate Burns Philp in 1982. The ownership of the Skipping Girl brand subsequently passed to Burns Philp’s former subsidiary, Goodman Fielder, where it resides today. In supermarkets, the brand gradually diminished in significance, becoming a Cornwell’s sub-brand. As recently as 1990, it was still available from “Myer’s Wonderful World of Food”, where it was classified as a “dinkum” Aussie product along with Witchetty Grub Soup, Old Bush Eucalyptus Tea and Vegemite. But the Skipping Girl name became smaller and smaller until it disappeared altogether, and the only link to the past is a picture on the Cornwell’s labels.
Fortunately, we still have the sign. I see it every single day. And although it’s not visible from my window, at night I can see the flickering colours reflected in the windows of another apartment building a little further along the Yarra bank. Skip on, Audrey.