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Cured’ and ‘Goanna Salves Humanity’. The exact ingredients of Marconi’s original wonder salve remain a secret, as mysterious as the story of the man who made it. Today, Goanna Salve comes
in a jar. ‘Keeping Australians on the move,’ the label says above an image of a prowling goanna, its tail bending like the Murray River. The salve smells like a less potent ‘Deep Heat’ and looks like rindless orange marmalade. It rubs into the skin well and is more spreadable than Vicks and not as sticky as Tiger Balm.
In the early 1900s Marconi was able
to obtain an abundance of Goanna Salve key ingredient by enlisting the help of kids across Queensland who were perpetually – on the lookout for goannas, the fat of which was cut out of the reptile, placed on sheets of iron in the sun, melted into bottles, and posted to Marconi in Bulimba for a princely sum.
However its been decades since it actually contained any goanna fat. Today’s Goanna Salve is made from eucalyptus oil, pine oil, peppermint
oil, camphor, menthol and turpentine. Then, below the list of ingredients a name – JC Marconi.
According to Pat Mackay, Marconi’s grand daughter, when Marconi was with the touring vaudeville troupe he met a curious character, Lyn Vane, a sideshow performer whose act involved being bitten by deadly snakes and,
to the surprised gasps of audience members, not dying.
Vane’s secret was a bottled antidote made from stewed Australian native plants which were popular with goannas. It was on an excursion into the bush with Vane, in search of
these plants, that Marconi watched Aborigines spreading goanna fat, mixed with dirt, over their wounds.
Compare this with the story of August King and Eichorn’s Remedy.–Pharmacy History Australia Vol 3, No 28 Mar 2006;13.
As is often the case with these ‘wondrous’ discoveries, Marconi, in a flash of outback genius, mixed Vane’s snakebite antidote with the goanna fat and Goanna Salve was born.
‘Nobody knows exactly where that was,’ says Mackay, leafing through a family
Lizard wizard: The founder of Goanna Salve, Joe Marconi (left), advertises his product at the 1917 Brisbane Exhibition.
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photo album before stopping on a tiny black and white photo. It’s her as a child, not more than three. She’s being hugged by her father, Cornelius, the second youngest of Joe’s six children, in front of the Marconi family home at 2 Oxford St, Bulimba, the home of Goanna Salve.
The two key ingredients to Joe Marconi’s success, says Mackay, were roguish smarts and rare compassion. It was the rogue who built a fortune out of goanna fat. Marconi drew heavily on the fact it was Australian-made – bottles featured maps of Australia and goannas dressed like drovers in the outback, lassoing and gunning down various cartoon germs and nasties.
Marconi made a fortune from World War I. A tin of Marconi’s Goanna Salve was as welcome in the trenches as a
hip flask of Scotch. Diggers used it to soothe their piles, clean their foot sores and lubricate their guns. Any goanna that died between 1914 and 1918, Marconi said, died for its country.
His compassionate side helped sales, too. He had a good name. He was quick with a loan. Streams of polio sufferers visited his home for free Goanna Salve massages. He cared for his community – the wharfies, the painters, dockers and the meatworkers.
‘He was a very generous man, my grandfather,’ says Mackay, adding that
he had been only trying to help the man who killed him in 1922. ‘He was in a hotel in the city and somebody
had asked him for money. I don’t think he had much on him. Joe said, “Well, you can have this, mate”. The other bloke was drunk, of course. The bloke might have gotten a bit aggressive and pushed him. In the scuffle, he fell and his head hit the cement and that was it. Shocking, completely shocking.’
His death made headlines in the local papers, and became folklore across neighbourhood fences. ‘Old Marconi’s dead,’ sang the kids of Bulimba: ‘Knocked on the head/goannas are glad/ children are sad/Old Marconi’s dead.’ Before long the ditty was part of the Goanna Salve story. Advertisements featured a small girl straddling a goanna, the words printed above her tears. The rogue in Joe probably would have loved it.
Today, the only connection Mackay has with Goanna Salve is the name JC Marconi featured on every jar sold, a stipulation Marconi’s children made when the company was sold to Herron Pharmaceuticals in 1982.
1. Photographs by Russell Shakespeand part
of the content of an Interview with Pat Mackay, by kind permission of the Editor, OW supplement to the Brisbane Courier Mai, Mar 2006.