1950s

Sun worshipping has always been a pastime on Bondi Beach, as it has at many of the world’s beaches. Bondi sun bathers lucky enough to be alive between the 1930s and the 1960s could purchase an oily suntan product called Vita Tan, from a world-renowned outlet called Mac’s Beach Hire, located under the Bondi Promenade. The family business was headed by Stan ‘Mac’ McDonald, who from the 1910s to 1933 had been Bondi’s chief beach inspector.

The oil in Vita Tan was sourced from an eccentric industrial chemist named John Black Paterson, who lived on Queensland’s Gold Coast. He obtained the substance from mutton birds, perfumed and deodorised it, coloured it so it looked like an Aussie rosé wine, and marketed it as resulting in “a satin-like finish suntan while preventing and curing sunburn and protecting the skin from peeling and dryness”.

 John spruiked his invention’s benefits while wearing a pith helmet (a lightweight cloth-covered helmet made of sholapith) mounted with a stuffed mutton bird and getting about in his Rolls Royce on which the bonnet was regally ornamented with a stuffed mutton bird and most of the door panels were plastered with Vita Tan ads. Mutton-bird oil had once been used experimentally to treat ailments such as pulmonary tuberculosis, and to convince potential buyers of its health-giving properties, John went so far as to drink a schooner of it in the beer garden of the Surfers Paradise Hotel.

At the Mac’s Beach Hire outlet, Stan McDonald and his family sold the Vita Tan in labelled bottles, and even more popular was its direct application to beach goers’ skin by way of a spray gun that had a hose hooked up to a 44-gallon drum filled with the stuff.

Odd but enterprising chemist John Black Paterson eventually changed his product’s name to Vita Sun, knowing that tan seekers were increasingly becoming concerned about over-exposure to the sun, and after he died, the formula was changed to include a Swiss sunscreen.

Courtesy Lawrie Williams and the Waverley Library Local Studies Collection.