My name is Geoff Alway and I openly confess I have an “addiction”. Yes, I am an unashamed, habitual collector. At a recent social function, I was asked by a fellow whether I had any hobbies. My initial response was “I am a collector of sorts”. Not hard to guess what the next question was: “so what do you collect?” That’s when it became a tad difficult to explain in simple terms, to someone I had only just met what my collecting obsessions were. With impeccable timing, my wife interrupted with the comment “easier to ask what he doesn’t collect”. A little bit disingenuous of her particularly when she says she doesn’t collect anything. Mind you, she certainly rivals the Kardashians in terms of acquiring clothes, fashion and trendy techy things with daily on-line purchasing. But that is another story.
After a minute or two, I confessed to the inquisitive enquirer that I didn’t collect stamps and coins. He replied, “My god, I have collected stamps and coins since I was a little boy”. The evening became a wonderfully nostalgic discussion on our respective childhoods, what treasures we kept and of course, what got thrown out and what it would be worth today.
So now that I have had time to reflect on my life as an “addict”, I thought it might be useful to create a blog to share my experiences with others who might wish to understand the true meaning of the phrase “Once a Collector – Always a Collector”. My intention is to approach this task in a passionate, interesting, eclectic, irreverent and disjointed fashion, the same approach I have taken since I started collecting all kinds of things as a very young boy and which I have continued to do all of my adult life.
In general terms I am an avid collector of:
OLD AUSSIE RULES FOOTBALL & CRICKET CARDS:
- SCANLEN’S GUM CARDS – FOOTBALL CRICKET, SOCCER AND NON SPORT CARDS
- VINTAGE CIGARETTE CARDS
- CEREAL & TRADE GIVE-AWAY CARDS PRODUCED BY KORNIES, COLES, ARGUS, MOBIL, ATLANTIC, TWISTIES & KELLOGG’S
SPORTING MEMORABILLIA, EPHEMERA & COLLECTABLES:
- VFL, AFL & VFA FOOTBALL
- CRICKET
- HORSE RACING
- OLYMPICS
MODEL CARS, TOYS, MUSIC MEMORABILLIA, EPHEMERA
- MATCHBOX, DINKY, CORGI, MODELS OF YESTERYEAR TOY CARS
- ELVIS PRESLEY, BEATLES DOLLS
- VINTAGE TIN TOYS
- PHOTO’S, MAGAZINES, PROGRAMS, BADGES, AUTOGRAPHS, POSTERS AND OTHER RARE AND INTERESTING SOUVENIRS
WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
I was born in Ballarat and I am proud to say that no child on earth could have had a more loving upbringing or better childhood. On reflection, I guess it would have been 1964, when as a very young boy the collecting bug really got me. I started collecting the little Walt Disney give-away comics (24 in the series), which were given away with petrol at Mobil service stations. The same year, my father started giving me the Mobil VFL football cards (starting in 1964 and ending in 1971) which he received with his weekly tank of petrol.
In those early years of the 1960’s I can also vividly recall collecting Tarax lemonade caps, which on the inside featured faces of leading VFL footballers. My grandmother, who minded me before and after school, would each week buy me comics from the local milk bar/newsagent. I simply learnt to read, following the exploits of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge through those comic books. I also recall my mother giving gave me the colourful Teddy Bear magazines (printed in England) each fortnight. By the time I was ten, I already had accumulated a solid collection of Australian published Walt Disney comics and also a range of Gold Key and Dell U.S. published comics, with those beautiful glossy covers featuring comic stories related to the latest popular TV shows and movies. The Three Stooges, Top Cat, The Man from UNCLE, Star Trek, Bonanza, My Favourite Martian, and any comics featuring the Warner Bros. or Hanna Barbera cartoon characters were favourites. It was later that I focused my energies on collecting golden and silver age U.S. printed Marvel and D.C. superhero comic books, as well as the highly sought after and now elusive black and white Phantom comic books published in Australia by Frew Publications in Sydney.
As a young boy, like the majority of my peers, I was an Aussie Rules devotee and I collected those wonderful Scanlens Aussie Rules footy cards, trading with other kids at primary school and with my friends. In those days there was no such thing as protective card sleeves or card holders, which are the norm these days to protect trading cards. It was school pants pockets and rubber bands way back then. That is why those 1960’s footy cards are often hard to find in fine condition. The first Scanlens footy cards I can remember collecting were the second series of 33 cards, printed in 1964. My passion for collecting footy cards really ramped up when Scanlens brought out their 1966 series of cards with twelve elusive die cut cards.
I loved the Beatles, and when they toured Australia in 1964, my father gifted me the obligatory plastic Beatle wig and I also started collecting Beatle cards and magazines and other souvenirs. I even collected stamp sheets featuring the fab four (so on reflection I slightly misled the person whom I referred to earlier who asked me about my hobbies). I was brought up surrounded by a family of avid horse racing enthusiasts. My grandfather used to give me all of the used race-day programs he acquired from his days as a bookies clerk at the Ballarat races (Dowling Forest) and from the Burrumbeet New Year’s Day race meeting. Does anyone recall that a horse called Girrawanna won the 1967 Burrumbeet Cup? It was the first race meeting I attended, and I still remember it like it was yesterday.
I also painstakingly put together a range of scrapbooks featuring footy, horseracing, and magazine and newspaper cuttings of The Beatles and The Monkees. I also started collecting Turf Monthly and Racetrack magazines, in the mid 1960’s. I still have my old annual J.J. Miller’s Sporting Annuals (aka Miller’s Guides) which have for almost a century been published each year once the weights for the Melbourne Cup are announced each year. In my family the Miller’s Guide was fondly referred to as the Punter’s Bible. I did devote a lot of my time to those obligatory “religious” studies!!
In the coming weeks, I will focus my blogging on particular collecting themes and hopefully provide you with some insight into the fun, trials and tribulations, wins and losses I have experienced from a true collector’s point of view.
If you would like to visit my website, please go to:
And remember, despite what some people may say, “every-one does collect something”.
To quote the late, great American radio announcer John Doremus (yes, they actually named a racehorse after him called Doriemus which ironically went on to win the Caulfield and Melbourne Cup double in 1995):
Our time is up till we meet again for with another chapter of the passing parade
This is Geoff Alway thank you so much and goodbye for now
Geoff Alway
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