01 | The Buried Tea Chests

When journalist Annika Blau learns of the discovery of two tea chests of highly valuable letters under the floorboards of an old Sydney home, she begins to uncover secrets, silences and shame from a chapter of Australia's history some would prefer to forget.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Hello, Hilary Harper, jumping into ABC Rewind to bring you an extraordinary tale about one family's surprise discovery of its buried history. Producer Annika Blau knew she had a German surname and that her family was connected to the famous perfume 4711, the oldest cologne in the world. But that was about it, until one day, while Googling her surname, Annika stumbled across something strange. A man in Sydney was touring an exhibition of letters and postcards written by her relatives. How on earth did this stranger come to have her family's archives? And why was it on show? After weeks of cold calling, Annika finally convinced Paul Storm to meet her. Here's Annika Blau with the buried tea chest.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I'm arriving at Paul Storm's house. I don't know this man, but he somehow has a lot of information about my family, including personal correspondence that's over 100 years old. None of my family knew this, and none of us have ever met him. So I rock up to what looks like an ordinary brick cottage in Sydney's northern suburbs, but when I step inside, it's anything but.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  There are clocks in every room in the house, and the one sort of clock that was missing was a cooker clock. And this one turned up about two years ago, and it's sort of finished my row of clocks around the house.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Paul Storm is a collector, and his house is a treasure trove.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  That's how you wind it, you pull the weight up.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  It's not just the multiple clocks in each room. Every wall and every surface is covered in Paul's collections.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  I'd never seen stained glass in every window of a suburban home, but Paul's house was a first for everything. And laid out across the dining room table was Paul's most prized collection of all: my family's mail. My eyes were drawn to the name on an antique postcard. It was the name of my great-great-grandfather, Julius Blau.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  That was a card sent to Julius. And it's addressed Vienna 11th of January 1898. Dear Mr. Blau, My hearty congratulations for your elevation to 4711.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  That's 4711, the oldest cologne in the world. My family worked as agents for the German perfume.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  That's early for a picture postcard. The address in Budapest...

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Is not in Hungarian, but in German.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Now I know where they lived.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  It means Eagle Street.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I was confused. An address in Budapest? Were my family actually Hungarian? And how did this postcard end up here? Well, about 30 years ago, Paul says he had a call from his friend Gary, a stamp dealer who ran an auction house in Sydney's West.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  So I can't remember exactly how it happened, but anyway, he invited me to help him sort this stuff out. And his version of the story was it was a young fella came to him with two tea chests. And the material was just cluttered and stuffed into them, some of it in very bad condition.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Gary had just purchased two tea chests of very old mail from a tradie, who had found them under a house he was demolishing.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  And he bought the whole lot outright. The guy then, I think he got something like $20,000 for it. This is 1990 or something. And he's chucked his job in and set himself up as a cleaning business.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  So the tradie took home enough cash for a house deposit, but it was small change compared with what Gary reckoned he could make from these shabby chests. I've heard the contents ended up fetching around half a million dollars, probably more than the value of the home itself. So what was in the chests?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  It was a hoard of very mixed material, some of it very personal of the family, and a lot of commercial mail. And this was all 100 years old. Some of the most extraordinary locations.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Paul very quickly found out what the name Blau represented. Exotic travel, 4/7/11 perfume, high society Sydney, and political intrigue.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  And in amongst it, there was a lot of mail out of military camps.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  It wasn't just rare stamps and Blau family letters. There was also mail that reflected a part of Australia's war history we've tried to forget.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Mail out of prisoner of war camps.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And personal history that my family tried to forget.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  This story was getting more intriguing.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  The rare stamps and letters were auctioned off in the early 1990s. And the Blau Hall, as it was soon called, was declared to be one of the most important finds in Commonwealth postal history.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  All of Sydney was abuzz. Ah, all of Sydney knew this was on. I mean, I'm a bucket mouth.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Well, not everyone, but definitely the antique dealers. And it was collected by Julius's son, my great-grandfather, Oscar Blau.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  By the time Gary was up to sale number three of material, all the world knew about the Blau collection. And the Blau material was going all over. The bids were coming hot and strong. And they were bringing hundreds of dollars per item.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  And my family had no idea this was happening. You may be wondering why Paul or Gary didn't try to find a Blau in Sydney. Well, Paul did start to search, but said he didn't have much luck. And anyway, the tea chests were officially the property of the auctioneer. Most of the stamps and letters were then sold. But Paul Storm chose to keep some personal correspondence between my family members. He liked old mail from exotic places.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  They travelled widely and they must have been brave to go to the places that they went to. And he is the best traveller in all the world is Julius.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  My great-great-grandfather Julius Blau was travelling the world at the turn of the last century, flogging the famous perfume with his sons Oscar and Robert.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  He regularly would get on a boat in Vienna or Budapest and he'd go down the Danube and he'd finish up in Constantinople, so we stand bald. But New Guinea in 1900? Who would want 4711? And he got to places like Murray Island. Now Murray Island is the island in the Torres Strait between Queensland and Papua. It's the island where Eddie Mabo came from. And in 1900, you can't imagine that it were more than 10 people that would have even thought of even vaguely using something like 4711. But he got there and

• 7:46Speaker 02

  he got to Fanning Island in the Gilbert Islands, way out in the Pacific. So I think a lot of the time he was travelling for his own pleasure as well as selling. They were such extraordinary places. And any mail out of those places that survived is just so scarce. Madagascar on the coast of Africa.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Wow, he really went everywhere.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  An inland Zanzibar, would you please? They certainly were adventurous.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So with all these intimate Blau postcards and letters, how seriously did Paul try to find any Sydney descendants? Back in the 90s, Paul located Julius's granddaughter Vilma Blau, a great aunt I didn't know, thanks to a family falling out about who inherited the perfume licence.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Vilma, in her 60s then, was in shock after Paul's surprise visit to her at work. She went straight to her family with the news.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  My aunt said, "I've had the strangest thing happen to me today."

• 8:50Speaker 01

  That's Vilma's niece, Kim, who I didn't know existed until Paul introduced us.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  And I said, "What happened?" And she said, "A man came into the office." I didn't know who he was, I'd never seen him before, and I assumed that he was someone who was trying to talk to me about business. And he said, "No, no, no, I've actually come on another matter. I have some things of yours." And immediately, she said, I was taken aback. What was hard for her was this man produced a very old letter

• 9:33Speaker 03

  and passed it across the desk to her. And she said, "I just drew in my breath and I was so taken aback because there was my grandfather's handwriting. And it was a letter addressed to my father. And my father died in the 50s. And this letter was much older than that. And it really shocked me," she said.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  The envelope had a little picture of the hotel on the front, and she looked at it and she said, "My daddy taught me to dance in that hotel."

• 10:13Speaker 03

  It was a letter almost from the grave.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Vilma's father was Robert Blau and her grandfather was Julius. At the time, Vilma didn't want anything to do with Paul Storm and his letters. But when I finally got in touch, Vilma had just died. Paul figured he might have better luck with the younger generation, so he invited Vilma's niece, Kim, to his quirky cottage and we instantly clicked.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  We soon realised we'd inherited different versions of our family history. So we decided to get the story straight.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  At the turn of last century, our relatives were living the European high life. They were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with business connections in Germany. And patriarch Julius Blau was travelling the world, making a small fortune from his four 7-Eleven perfume deals. Kim's aunt Vilma would often tell her about her grandfather.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  My aunt always described him as a very jovial and incredibly happy sort of man. Little in a Hamburg hat, who smoked cigars, was impeccably dressed. Never seen out of a suit coat and waistcoat and a fob chain and watch, and very dapper. An early adapter too of new things, like so he has a car. He loves all of those sorts of trappings of modernity and respectability.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  And he'd make sure he was always in the right social circles. On one of his business trips to Sydney, he befriended another canny merchant, Sir Samuel Horton. Julius was complaining about life in Europe, so Horton suggested he bring the family here. So in 1908, he did.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  There may have been other reasons for leaving Europe. Religious tensions were rising and the drums of war were beating.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  He knew that things were bad and going to get worse in Europe. And so where was the furthest place he could go? And Australia was it. And it was a conscious decision to come to Australia, not America or any other place. He came first and then his wife and all the kids.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Julius and his wife Bertha set up in a large house in Bellevue Hill with their two daughters and three sons, and immediately got to work on Sydney's high society.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  They holidayed at the newly opened Hydro Majestic Hotel, hosted weekly lunches, and sought the most eligible matches for their children.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  One of the fairest and most popular of our society girls, Miss Ella Blau, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Blau, is to be wed to the well-known barrister.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  And the wedding bells kept ringing.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  A marriage has been arranged between Mr. Robert Blau, second son of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Blau of Bellevue Hill, and Miss Foley of Balmain, one of the smartest and prettiest of Sydney's girls. The Blau family appear to be the most...

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Smart and pretty Rita Foley was Kim's grandmother.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Rita Foley was an heiress of the Foleys Butter family, and they had dairies and butter all the way up and down the east coast of Australia. So she was a very wealthy woman, and Robert was a sort of exotic European type of bachelor.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  The Blau family was on a charm offensive, and within a couple of years, they'd become darlings of the Sydney social set. In an elaborate PR stunt, they even donated over 100 bottles of 4/7/11 Ode Cologne to the quarantine station at Manly.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  And then suddenly, they were the enemy. It was 1914, and the Great War had reached Australia. And the Blau's, being Hungarian, were on the wrong side. And they were working for a famous German company. It was now very awkward.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  As soon as the war broke out in August 1914, all around the world, all the aliens were immediately locked up, the males.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Collector Paul Storm realised from the hall what had happened to my family.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  The Germans, the Austrians, the Hungarians were all immediately locked up.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  We worked out from the mail that Oscar and Julius, so father and son, as enemy aliens when the First World War broke out, had been interned. That is, became prisoners of war. So they're not soldiers, they're civilian, civilian prisoners.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  It was in this internment camp that Oscar collected the correspondence from fellow prisoners that made the tea chests so valuable. But both Kim and I wondered how the well-respected businessmen Julius and Oscar landed behind bars. We sensed there may be more to it. So next stop, the National Archives, to see if we could find some answers.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  The Australian Federal Police files on the Blaus were enormous. They contained intimate details about our family. Like this on Oscar Blau.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  He had brown eyes, five foot nine and a half. His brown hair. Tattoo on left forearm of a dragon.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Of a dragon?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Good lord.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Dragon tattoos in 1917?

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, unbelievable. Surveillance, it's the state. Surveillance was not just by the state, it's by ordinary citizens as well.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  The files revealed that neighbourhood surveillance started long before Julius and Oscar were interned. And some of these tip-offs came from their closest friends.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  I do not wish to be an alarmist,

• 16:57Speaker 03

  but as the two Blau sons, Oscar and Robert, are Austrian cavalry officers, there is a natural suspicion. And this is the great letter from the snooping neighbour, a Mr...

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Hundreds of Australians born abroad landed in internment camps due to letters like these.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  I do not say that the wireless is being used there, but a connection could quickly be made there at night.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  So they've drawn the streets and they've put an X that says, "Blau's Old House, Standing Among Trees." But when it came to our family, those letters initially fell on deaf ears. But then, we found the documents that revealed the tipping point, where Julius did something unforgivable.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  So shortly after the outbreak of the SED war, the New South Wales stocks of the SED 4/7/11 eau de Cologne became practically exhausted. And on or about the 16th day of January 1915, Julius Blau obtained permission from the Commonwealth of Australia to visit America for the purposes of obtaining plant for the manufacture of perfume. Aliens like Julius aren't supposed to leave the country during the war. But apparently, he sweet-talks the Attorney General, Billy Hughes. Julius says he'll stop importing the German 4/7/11 perfume and instead manufacture it in Australia, creating jobs. But first, he needs to go to America to find a skilled chemist and source ingredients.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  The Defence Department, however, intercept a telegram that suggests this might not be Julius's real motive. The telegram saying from the Germans, "Can't wait till you get to New York."

• 18:42Speaker 03

  "We're happy to see you." Even though he's been expressly told he cannot...

• 18:47Speaker 01

  ...meet with any Germans.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  ...any enemies.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Defence tells the government that instead of letting Julius go to America, it should charge him with attempting to trade with the enemy. But Billy Hughes sides with Julius and lets him go.

• 19:02Speaker 05

  The question is on every lip. What is the mysterious political pull which Julius Blau, the alien enemy, has over the patriot, W.M. Hughes?

• 19:14Speaker 01

  The military commander is so alarmed that he personally goes down to the port to try to stop Julius boarding the ship. But nothing stops the determined Julius.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  The oceanic male steamer Sonoma, Mr Julius Blau of 4/7/11 Cologne fame, was a passenger visiting America by special permission of the Commonwealth Government.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  But what Julius doesn't know is that there are spies following him. And that's a problem because he's meeting Germans from 4/7/11. They've got a plan to sell the perfume in disguise.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  The perfume will be produced in America and stamped, made in America, therefore making it okay. But the ingredients are from Germany. It's an elaborate scheme.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  And for a few months, the scheme works. But then Julius's dodgy labels are revealed. The incident becomes a big scandal. The opposition seizes on the fact that Billy Hughes let Julius leave the country, against the advice of the Defence Department. And Sydney laps it up.

• 20:31Speaker 05

  Had the then Minister of Defence been a man, instead of a spineless lackey, Blau would have been arrested on the eve of his...

• 20:40Speaker 01

  The heat is on the government, and it's hurting Billy Hughes' political aspirations. Two weeks before Hughes becomes Prime Minister, Julius Blau & Sons is declared an enemy firm, its assets seized. Then, on Christmas Eve, the government announces its intern Julius & Oscar, probably to lift the morale of families spending their first Christmas with their men fighting abroad.

• 21:07Speaker 05

  ...7-11 Ode Cologne fame was interned last Monday with his son, Mr. Oscar Blau. The question has been widely asked: Why was this step not taken a year ago? The answer given is: Better late than never.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Julius & Oscar become government war trophies. The locking up of high-profile aliens was intended to scare others into line. But the grassroots anti-German leagues lobbied for all enemy aliens to be interned, including Oscar's brother Robert, Kim's grandfather.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  Robert Blau has been seen recently in Sydney driving a well-equipped motorcar, whose number has apparently been changed from 4711 to 4511. It would be interesting to know what influence secured the number 4711, and why this enemy subject still lives in luxury.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  And while Robert escaped internment, the Blau family name had been tarnished. Soon after, Robert and his heiress-wife Rita Foley divorced. And in court, she cited irreconcilable political differences.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Kim now understood her Aunt Vilma's reticence in talking about the Blouse wartime history and what happened to her uncle and grandfather.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Somehow, in the late 70s, the story of the internment camp came out. She knew it, but she was cross. You know, it was like, oh, well, don't. Do we have to? Do we have to go there? She was quite flustered by it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what? And as a young child, I think she deeply understood the shame of this. And so the story I get is of the jolly grandfather. I don't get any of the dirt, but my gut tells me there's more to this story. And that whole internment, for her generation, was embarrassing.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  And Mark, that family is different, is dangerous aliens. And they were doing everything that they could to be respectable business people.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Holsworthy Camp at Liverpool, on Sydney's outskirts, was known as one of Australia's harshest internment camps. While in the camp, the Blouse lawyers put together their defence of charges of attempting to trade with the enemy. But they also had another concern. See, 4/7/11 was made with a secret recipe. The miracle water was originally a drink, but when Napoleon ruled that all tonics had to list their ingredients, it became a perfume to avoid that.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  It's a bit like getting the secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  A century on, there was a new threat to this secret recipe, as we found out at the National Archives. This one is saying, "We would remind you of your promise to our clients to seal up and not remove the secret formula for 4/7/11 perfume."

• 24:26Speaker 03

  The recipe.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  The secret recipe.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Somewhere in those papers,

• 24:32Speaker 03

  there must be the recipe for 4/7/11.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Maybe it's in this box. While their lawyers were fighting for the preservation of the secret recipe and Julius and Oscar's freedom, their wives were also pleading for their release. But the official response was disheartening. Blau's release would, in view of the fact that he attempted to trade with the enemy, create a great feeling of suspicion among the public. And for this reason, it is not recommended that the application be granted. So, public anxiety won out. The father and son spent the next four years behind barbed wire.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  To cope with the boredom, my great-grandfather Oscar began collecting stamps from other prisoners' letters. And nearly 100 years later, this hobby of his turned out to have been extremely lucrative.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  This is what court collector Paul Storm's eye when he looked inside those tea chests.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Philately, it's postal history and it's history. And military mail and prisoner of war is popular. It wouldn't be as rare as Titanic mail or as valuable. But you would tumble over. You would get run down in the rush. So there's Julius and Oscar clearly pestering all their associates in the Liverpool camp for their mail.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  And there it is, in the tea chest.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  This mail haul led me to Paul Storm's house. But its revelation has only skimmed the surface of our family's story. I want to know more about my relatives' wartime experience and what really happened to split the family apart.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  But as I keep digging, I find out that the mail, the internment camp and 4/7/11 are just the beginning of my family's secrets.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  And the revelations keep coming. In our next episode, Annika makes a bombshell discovery and learns just why all the letters might have been hidden under a house nearly 100 years ago.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  It turns out that the internment experience wasn't our only family secret.

• 27:00Speaker 06

  Bankruptcy. Liabilities amounting to £24,109 were included in the Statement of Affairs of Oscar Blau.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Well-known department store maverick Mark Foy took him to the bankruptcy court. Oscar's resulting loss also sent his father Julius bankrupt, again.

• 27:21Speaker 07

  I gave my son some money. And then he got into trouble. And I sent him some more money. Then came the depression. And the creditors were on me like a pack of wolves.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  When the embarrassing news of Julius's bankruptcy reached 4/7/11 in Germany, the perfume licence was transferred from Julius to his second son, Robert, Kim's grandfather.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  The Buried Tea Chest was written by Annika Blau. The sound engineer was John Jacobs. And the producer was Roz Blewett. This is Rewind on ABC Radio National.