The great Clifton Pugh Stobie pole scandal began on a winter’s day in 1984 against the backdrop of a rollicking party.
At a hair salon in suburban Adelaide, a robot trundled around delivering drinks. Bodybuilders – men and women in skimpy outfits – flexed their muscles. Dozens of balloons floated into the air above a giant bubble bath.
And the former premier Don Dunstan – a flamboyant, bisexual, progressive wearer of pink shorts – unveiled a painting of Adam and Eve.
It was not just any painting. Three-time Archibald prize-winning artist Clifton Pugh painted the pair on a Stobie pole – a uniquely South Australian power pole – their nakedness barely covered by the biblical serpent. The nudity caused outrage.
Shortly after its unveiling, the local council’s Graeme Dimond said people found the placement of the serpent offensive.
“When you have the tail of the serpent that starts where Adam’s penis would normally be and writhes around Eve’s breasts, and then with the head of the serpent sitting on her belly pointing fairly at the vagina, it’s no wonder a lot of people in our community find that distasteful,” he told the ABC.
Dunstan said “only the most exaggerated of prudes” could think it obscene.
“I think they know absolutely nothing about art, and I don’t think they know too much about life either,” he said.
Nevertheless, Prospect council ordered the Clifton Pugh Stobie pole to be removed. And then it disappeared.
Forty years since the artwork sparked accusations of lewdness and counteraccusations of prudishness, there’s a renewed hunt for it.
Paul Roberts is the head of corporate affairs for the electricity distributor SA Power Networks. He has also written a song about Stobie poles and, coincidentally, was at the 1984 unveiling as a reporter. He says no one knows – or is saying – where the pole is today.
“We’re trying to track it down – and it’s probably quite valuable,” he says.
“We just think it’s one of those iconic things. The intersection between history, culture and the iconic role of the Stobie pole. It reflects the cultural change the state was going through.”
South Australia’s Stobie power poles were invented due to a lack of suitable wood and a surplus of termites. The ugly, flat concrete surfaces have become canvases for community art projects, decorated by schoolchildren, sporting groups and the occasional world-famous painter.
“I know they’re not the most beautiful things, but they’re a beautiful solution,” Roberts says.
“They’re actually bushfire resistant and incredibly resilient. They’re something uniquely South Australian [and] far more important than frog cakes.”
Dunstan was at the heart of the cultural change in SA during his term as premier.
In the 1970s, Dunstan had an affair with Pugh’s partner, Judith Pugh, according to Dunstan’s biographer, Angela Woollacott.
Clifton Pugh already had a wife at the time, but Judith had changed her surname by deed poll. Judith fell pregnant and it wasn’t clear whether Dunstan or Pugh was the father.
“This was the 70s. Everyone was having sex with everybody. It was before Aids and after the pill,” Woollacott, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, says. She interviewed Judith while researching her book Don Dunstan: The Visionary Politician who Changed Australia.
“Judith and Don agreed she’d have an abortion. She didn’t tell Clif but he guessed she was pregnant and knew that, actually, she would have liked to have the child. So he rang Don,” Woollacott says.
“Clif proposed he’d divorce his wife and marry Judith. Judith would have the baby and then she and Clif would get divorced so she and Don could marry, and Clif and Don would take joint responsibility for the child. They genuinely didn’t know at that point who was the father.
“It was elaborate but this would enable it all to be respectable. That was the plan … but she miscarried, which was very traumatic.”
But Dunstan and Pugh were “truly friends”, Woollacott says, so years later they were at that 1984 street party for the opening of Hair International.
It was Don Violi’s salon. He says arts identity and salon client Russell Starke, along with his wife and business partner, Ruth Starke, were the PR gurus behind the festivities and he had no idea where it would lead.
“Anne Newmarch, who’s a client of ours, she was an artist in residence in Prospect and her project was painting the Stobie poles. And Russell knew Clifton Pugh’s agent,” he says.
“[Starke] rings me up and says we’ve got this guy Clifton Pugh, he’s world-renowned, he’s going to do it for free.
“Then council wanted to see a cartoon … when they saw the content they didn’t like it and said we couldn’t do it. We did it anyway. We took Clifton out for lunch the day before and told him the council didn’t want it, it was too provocative. He said ‘Fuck the council’.”
Once the painting was revealed, Violi says, and the council said it had to be removed, people offered to chain themselves to the Stobie to save it. Others offered to buy it.
One memorable tender came from Alec Brackstone, who the local paper described at the time as the “self-styled ‘Governor’ of the ‘Province of Bumbunga’ in SA’s mid-north who wants to make a cross from it and build a small chapel on his self-declared British province near Snowtown”.
In the end, Dr Barry Young, who was in charge of the Centre for Performing Arts, paid for the pole to be removed and installed in the centre’s car park.
“So the pole went there,” Violi says. “Then we lost track of it. No one seems to know where it is. And it’s probably worth a considerable amount of money.”
The Stobie pole was invented and patented by Cyril Stobie 100 years ago; its centenary is being celebrated at SA’s history festival this month. Tours of the manufacturing facility have been sold out, more have been added, and then they’ve sold out again.
Roberts from SA Power has also recorded a fresh version of his song In Praise of the Stobie: “There’s something I must tell you / It really won’t take long / In praise of an icon / It’s time to right a wrong / I’ve travelled far and wide / Studied history’s role / But nothing can compare / With Cyril Stobie’s pole.
“So lift your glass to Cyril / A man who’s made his mark / In wonderful perfection / His powerful erection / Keeps us from the dark.”
