Devon GeorGe Minchin

28 May 1919 – 30 May 2014

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Devon GeorGe Minchin

28 May 1919 – 30 May 2014

Fighter pilot, entrepreneur, philosopher, security expert, advertising man, Roman historian, industrial pioneer of

Southeast Asia, pineapple farmer and one-time confidant of The Beatles. It’s a list of disparate occupations that sounds like it has been plucked from the screenplay of some fictional Hollywood hero. But this hero is not fictional and the list represents only some of his achievements. He’s my Dad and he’s a real hero.

Devon Minchin was born in 1919. At the age of 17 he stoked coal on a steamship to work his passage to England. The teenager soon found himself poverty stricken in London so he decided to add five years and a Sydney University degree to his name. The “twenty-three year old” landed a job selling Vick’s Vapour Rub in Ireland. His cover was eventually blown, but not before he had proved himself as a first class salesman. Vick’s sent him to New York to learn high-pressure salesmanship.

The Americans were delighted with an eighteen year old Aussie putting one over the Limeys and they put him right to work in their toughest market, the Deep South.

After nearly a year of driving the back roads of the Missisipi, Alabama and Louisana selling the famous

liniment, war loomed and Devon hustled to San Diego for his passage back to Sydney.

He enlisted in the RAAF and passed the time waiting to be called up by flogging fly spray in outback Queensland. When the time came he bribed an officer with a bottle of Scotch so that would be sent to Rhodesia for training. It was there that he learnt to fly the P40 Kittyhawk fighter and by October 1942 he was stationed in North Africa as part of the famous “Desert Air Force”.

Devon was in 450 Squadron, the “Desert Harassers” which fought the Germans and Italians all the way from Egypt to Italy. He flew 116 operational sorties that involved innumerable desert dogfights. He shot down Messerschmitts at the battle of El Alemeine and was the first pilot to land on newly liberated Sicily. Devon’s love of music brought him wide acclaim; he penned the squadron song to the tune of Lily Marlene (the words of which are in the Australian War memorial archive). While stationed on the island he commandeered the Grand Albergo Hotel high on Mt Etna with the intention of providing a little respite for his fellow officers. By doing so he went down in folk lore as the man responsible for one of the biggest parties of the war!

Devon’s later water years saw him fly supplies in and out of Palestine, work as a test pilot in Aden and begin a long struggle with malaria. The war also provided an outlet for a budding creative mind. In 1944 he published his first novel The Potato Man.

In 1945 Devon transferred to the army’s 8th Division where his brother Lester was a captain. Both brothers were about to develop an incurable taste for the Southeast Asia. During his trip home, Devon had eight hours to kill in Bangkok. Using all of his savings he bought a heap of zircons. He carried them home in his pockets to great financial advantage.

Devon and Lester were posted to Borneo shortly before VJ Day. While Lester was a transport officer, Devon’s area of responsibility gave him a glimpse of evil. He was in charge of the protection of the notorious Japanese General Suga. Wounded and suicidal, this man had administered the horrors of the Kuching prison camps in Sarawak. Devon’s job was to save the general’s life and to help gather evidence needed to bring him to trial. In doing so he came face to face with unimaginable brutality of the Japanese occupation. He was particularly horrified by the sickening reality of the Sandakan Death march.

Devon’s first experience of Borneo

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Devon GeorGe Minchin | 28 May 1919 – 30 May 2014

wasn’t all bad. At the vast tent city that was Labuan hospital he met Susan Scott-Skirving. A graduate in anthropology from Sydney University she had spent the war years as an army nurse. She wanted to know why he was wearing wings on his army uniform. It took a while to explain and then he proposed. Devon and Susan married and returned to Sydney.

It didn’t take long for Devon and Lester to come up with a plan to return to the islands. They wanted to be the first to trade with Sandakan and Labuan (at the time part of British North Borneo). They bought an old tramp steam call The Bellbird and loaded it up with consumables. They left Sydney harbour on Friday 13th of April 1946 after the ship’s cat had deserted the boat and they took on a priest as a last-minute passenger. None of these omens seemed to worry the brothers until on their first night at sea a huge storm sunk the boat. All survived and were washed up near Barranjoey Lighthouse.

The ship was insured and the cargo was on ninety days credit so they tried again. This time they were successful and soon Susan had rejoined Devon on the familiar island of Labuan. The couple lived in an atap (straw hut) overlooking the harbour with a puppy, a honeybear and a turtle and it wasn’t long before they were speaking fluent Malay.

Meanwhile Devon and Lester launched a variety of experiments in shipping and trade in Southeast Asia. One enterprise arose from a random opportunity. The brothers found a brand-new sawmill still packed in crates and abandoned by the Japanese. Soon they were plying the crocodile infested waters of Sarawak’s Rejang River as they sought to establish a timber business.

It became apparent that Borneo was not going to provide the trade

bonanza that the brothers expected. The fledgling timber business was a massive drain on resources but they couldn’t back out now. They decided that Lester should stay and run the timber mill while Devon and Susan would move to Singapore to earn some money to keep the business afloat.

In 1948 Devon landed a job as circulation manager of the Straights Times newspaper and Susan began selling articles. Finally the couple had some money and a good place to live; furthermore the timber mill was now properly financed. All however sped toward tragedy.

The morning after swimming at the local public pool, the former nurse Susan calmly said, “I think I’m getting Infantile Paralysis (polio)”. The hospital had no iron lung but Devon discovered one at an Army dump. He never left the hospital, trying constantly to keep the lung going. Then on the third day Susan died. He buried her in Singapore and returned to Australia a broken man. Devon’s own left arm was paralysed and he knew that he too must be ill. The Sydney doctor, however, assured him that he was not sick but had a “stress induced” paralysis.

Overwhelmed by grief, Devon’s answer was to head for Hong Kong where he got a job as an account executive with Cathay Limited. The chain-smoking ad-man spent three wild years working long hours and parting hard in post-war Honkers. The entrepreneurial spirit was never suppressed however and one of his pastimes was helping his mate Syd de Kantzow, who was busy with his fledgling airline Cathay Pacific.

Back in Australia in 1952 Devon married a family friend named Betty Bentley. Betty was a widow with a six-year old daughter named Susan who Devon happily adopted. Lester had

purchased fifty-two acres at Dural to start a pig-farm and Devon, Betty and Susan settled down to a life of rearing hogs and sows.

The piggery didn’t prove to be much of an investment but it was during his time as pork purveyor that Devon was provided with a son (Nick, 1953) and a daughter (Melody, 1955).

With the Sarawak timber business starting to provide some income, Devon began to search for another investment opportunity. The purchase of a small Sydney night patrol business got him thinking. Why not create a company that incorporated all aspects of security from armed patrols to burglar alarms to money moving and cash counting? In 1954 Metropolitan Security Service (MSS) was born. To the best of Devon’s knowledge, his was the first private company in the world to include the word “security” in its name. Until then the word was widely acknowledged as the preserve of government.

The company developed over the next sixteen years to the stage when it had 46 branches and 1,400 staff (mostly armed) all over Australia. MSS required an exotic list of clients, including Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd (MSS were able to recover a diamond for them). The company was also responsible for one of the biggest security jobs ever undertaken in Australia, The Beatles tour of 1964.

Devon took overall charge of the mission, spending the entire three weeks never far from the Fab Four’s side. The tour was a security nightmare with thousands of fans besieging the hotels and doing anything they could to get in. The security men had to vet the dozens of female fans that ended up in the boys’ suites and Devon had the job of trying to provide security at the endless wild parties.

He got to know The Beatles well

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and became not only a bodyguard but a friend and confidant. There is a framed letter on Ansett notepaper hanging in Devon’s office that reads “Devon Minchin, the man who only allowed the finest birds into the suites, thank you” it’s signed by all four Beatles. Despite the fun, serious security issues developed and at one stage he “had to lecture (The Beatles) good and proper”. He used military tactics learned as a fighter pilot in World War II to manage the hundreds of thousands of hysterical fans.

Despite such high profile contracts, MSS’s main business was moving cash in armoured cars and preparing pay packets in its huge city counting houses. The company was doing well but tensions with the trade unions and the inherent risk of 1250 armed employees brought its won danger. Kidnapping and death threats were not uncommon and for a period in the late sixties Devon slept with a loaded pistol beside the bed. Things came to a violent and dramatic climax in 1970 when MSS’s Melbourne counting house was attacked by armed invaders who made off with nearly one million dollars in cash, at that time the biggest robbery in Australian history. Investigators established that it was an inside job. With insurance premiums about to skyrocket Devon sold the business to rival company Mayne Nickless a few months later.

Devon went on to write a novel based on the infamous robbery and his years in the security business. Called The Money Movers it was made into a Bruce Beresford-directed film starring Bryan Brown and Bud Tingwell.

The MSS years provided a backdrop to a tumultuous private life. Devon divorced Betty and in 1963 married Margo Brickhill. The Hartnell model had previously been married to

RAAF pilot and author Paul Brickhill (The Great Escape, The Dam Busters, Reach for The Sky). She brought with her two children (Tim, born 1955 and Tempe, born 1957). Margo and Devon had a daughter Katie who was to pass tragically in a car accident aged two. In 1969 they had a son who they called William.

Still only fifty years of age, Devon had already lived a packed life. By now the Minchin brothers’ timber business had left Borneo and re-established itself in the Solomon Islands. Their renewable and self-sustaining brand of timber cutting could not compete with the open-slather techniques that were introduced in post-colonial Malaysia.

In 1973 Devon bought a pineapple farm in Queensland and his life started to slow down a little. However he still found time to complete the University degree he had always longed for (a BA from Macquarie University), introduce the polygraph to Australian business and become the Chairman of the Board of The Sydney Dance Company.

By the late seventies he, Margo and William had moved to the pineapple farm and set about transforming the place into a thriving tropical fruit plantation. Just down the road was the little town of Noose Heads and the entrepreneurial Minchin didn’t take long to spot the potential of the place.

Eyeing with horror the planning disasters that had struck the Gold Coast, Devon was determined not to let that happen in Noosa. With the support of like-minded locals he used his influence as Chairman of the Noosa Tourism Board to help make Noose the low-rise resort that it is today.

Investing in the booming town has been kind to Devon, however he

also took some risks along the way. Chief among them was his outlandish decision to build a twin cinema in 1984. At a time when cinemas were closing all over the country and sales of VCRs were off the charts, many people thought he was mad to be putting money into such an old-fashioned idea. All Devon could think of was “what do people do with kids when it rains on their holiday?” The twin cinema now has five screens.

At around about the same time, the once adventure-hungry young man was about to settle into old-aged eccentricity by embarking on a thirteen year quest to study in minute detail every aspect of Late Antiquitian Rome. The result is a soon to be published trilogy of novels: a massive tome of over one million words.

Aged 90 and living in his beloved Queensland, Devon’s mind was as curious and as experimental as ever. His son Nick, now Federal Minister of Finance, presented him with an award on behalf of the Australian Government. It honoured him as “a pioneer and a visionary”. Devon responded with surprise “All I ever did was what seemed to come next.”

Devon Minchin’s life is an important story because it is one of the last tangible links we have with the pioneering spirit on which Australia is founded. The 226 years since Europeans first settled in Australia can be divided into just three 75-year life-spans, Devon’s is more than one of them. The vision, drive and compassion shown by Devon and other post-war Australian industrial pioneers are a national treasure. Their stories are our link with the past and a real guide as to what makes Australia the country that it is and indeed where it is headed in the future.

William Minchin, 2014

Devon GeorGe Minchin | 28 May 1919 – 30 May 2014