Australian Dictionary of Biography

Reginald Byron Jarvis (‘Rex’) Pilbeam (1907–1999), public servant, mayor, and politician, was born on 30 October 1907 at Longreach, Queensland, ninth of eleven children and younger son of John Thomas Pilbeam, a carrier born in New South Wales, and his Victorian-born wife Ellen, née Tonks. In 1912 Ellen relocated the lad and the then youngest five girls to coastal Emu Park, near Rockhampton, for education and to remedy her daughters’ sandy blight. John and the older siblings remained in the central west. Another girl was born later that year, and young Pilbeam effectively grew up in a female household.

From his days at Emu Park State School, Reginald rejected his given name and insisted on ‘Rex.’ After attending Rockhampton High School (1920–22), he joined the State Public Service in April 1923 as a clerk in the Public Curator’s Office, Brisbane; six months later he obtained a transfer to the organisation’s Rockhampton office. On 21 January 1927 at St Paul’s Church of England Cathedral, Rockhampton, he married Barbara Winning Rose (1904–1994), a stenographer. He returned to Brisbane in 1930 and worked in the Magistrate’s Court and later the State Advances Corporation. In 1931 he qualified for membership of the Australasian Institute of Secretaries and the Federal Institute of Accountants. Diverse activities filled his recreation hours during the 1930s: cricket, tennis, table tennis, reading, debating, and receiving classical-singing tuition.

Aged thirty-four and with two teenage sons, Pilbeam volunteered for service in World War II, beginning full-time duty in the Citizen Military Forces on 23 March 1942 and transferring to the Australian Imperial Force in June 1944. He served with the 61st Battalion in Papua (August 1942 to January 1944), New Guinea (September to November 1944), and Bougainville (November 1944 to September 1945), rising to acting (1942) and confirmed (1944) staff-sergeant. Later, he boasted that, in the islands, he ‘was soon … improvising entertainment [and] scrounging supplies by networking distant sources’ (Tucker 1999, 10) for military and canteen stores, especially superior American items. He was discharged on 20 November 1945 in Brisbane.

In December that year Pilbeam commenced as part-time secretary of the Eastern Downs Horticultural and Agricultural Association, in which role he revived its annual events: the Warwick Show and the Warwick Rodeo. He also held office in community organisations. In 1948 he resigned his paid and unpaid positions to become secretary-organiser of the Rockhampton Agricultural Society, beginning in January 1949. Farewell speeches at Warwick contained ‘glowing tributes to [his] organising ability, enthusiasm and initiative’ (Warwick Daily News 1948, 4).

Pilbeam drew on his experience to turn the ailing Rockhampton Show into a resounding success and to establish the Rocky Round-Up on the national rough-riding circuit from 1949. He became active in trotting and cycling, and he introduced children’s goat-cart racing. Believing he possessed the attributes and vision to turn a city ‘that had slumped badly, lost spirit, and was feeling … forgotten’ (Butler 1983, 7) into a beautiful modern municipality, he stood as an Independent for the 1952 Rockhampton City Council mayoral election. He won with an almost three-to-one majority.

Obstructive Australian Labor Party and other councillors meant Pilbeam—‘R.B.J.’ as he then signed—achieved relatively little during the 1950s apart from the construction of the Second World War Memorial Pool. In 1961 he assembled a team, later the Civic Independent Group, which captured all ten aldermanic positions in 1964. One rival claimed the CIG ‘represented the Liberal Party under another name’ (Morning Bulletin 1961, 10). Pilbeam thereafter held either a majority or parity in which he had the casting vote. Opponents, and some employees, considered him an ‘outright tyrant’ (Butler 1983, 7). A ‘hands-on manager’ (Tucker 2003, 166), he often investigated citizens’ complaints personally. Typically, he arrived by car, frequently accompanied by Arnold Philp, the long-serving city engineer, and always by his collie dog which had its own chair in the mayoral office. Behind the desk was a framed female nude; opposite hung his own portrait by Sir William Dargie.

Major civic projects came to fruition from the 1960s: Pilbeam Drive to the peak of Mt Archer; Pilbeam Hall in the residential college at the Queensland Institute of Technology (Capricornia) (later Central Queensland University), recognising his part in establishing the college in 1967; the Fitzroy River barrage, which drought-proofed the city; the Walter Reid Community Arts Centre; the Kenrick Tucker Velodrome; two childcare centres; two senior citizens’ centres and a pensioner cottage complex; kerb-to-kerb bitumen streets; sewered housing; the ‘Beef Capital’s’ iconic bull statues; a published city history; and the Pilbeam Theatre and Art Gallery. These and more he achieved while reducing the city’s debt substantially.

Mayor Pilbeam headhunted departmental managers from other cities and co-opted leading citizens to accomplish his goals; his forte was obtaining the necessary funds by ‘begging, bullying, scheming and working’ (Brown 1988, 19). In 1973 a Commonwealth government program offered a 70 per cent subsidy for galleries to purchase contemporary Australian art. Pilbeam raised $140,000 locally, spent twice that amount on 164 artworks, and then demanded the subsidy which totalled more than the annual national allocation. The mayor cried foul on refusal and, to resolve the issue, the Australia Council offered equal funding. Four decades later, the collection was valued at $14 million.

To better promote ‘neglected’ (Morning Bulletin 1956, 5) Central Queensland for the city’s benefit, Pilbeam had earlier sought a higher platform. He stood twice unsuccessfully for the seat of Rockhampton in the Legislative Assembly—in 1956 as a Liberal and in 1957 as an Independent. Regaining Liberal backing for the new seat of Rockhampton South in 1960, he won convincingly in an erstwhile Labor stronghold enfeebled by the party’s 1957 split. He retained the seat, concurrently with the mayoralty, until defeated in 1969. Commuting between Rockhampton and Brisbane by plane and train, he never missed a council meeting, nor did he take his full mayoral salary.

Often referred to as ‘the mayor-member’ and ‘Mr Rockhampton,’ Pilbeam participated in few parliamentary debates beyond local and regional concerns. Key among these were a sealed Longreach-to-Rockhampton highway and, with less success, expansion of Port Alma, within the jurisdiction of Rockhampton Harbour Board of which he was deputy chairman (1961–69). Lavish in his praise of monarch and ministers while frequently exchanging barbs with the Opposition Labor member for Rockhampton North, Pilbeam nevertheless crossed the floor to vote against any government motion detrimental to Rockhampton. To further the city’s cause, he became the foundation president (1960 and 1963–65) of the Central Queensland Local Government Association and vice-president in the early 1960s of the failed Capricornia New State Movement.

At age seventy-four Pilbeam launched a twelfth mayoral campaign in 1982 ‘because there was no one else’ (Morning Bulletin 1982, 2) when his preferred CIG candidate withdrew. Comparing himself to Sir Winston Churchill, he denied he was too old, yet—as with his parliamentary seat in 1969—the ‘old political warhorse’ (Gillespie 1988, 11) suffered defeat by a Labor figure three decades his junior. Pilbeam had been Rockhampton’s mayor for a remarkably long period of thirty years.

After a grand farewell concert in his namesake theatre, Pilbeam led a quieter life with his wife, Barbara, tending his rose garden; watching his racehorses, including Rexhampton and Rosehampton; barracking for Norths [Rockhampton] Rugby League Football Club, of which he was patron; and continuing his practice of many years of raising money for charities. Despite being feted as a ‘financial wizard’ (Morning Bulletin 1986, 18) while mayor, and a qualified accountant, Pilbeam proved less capable with personal money matters. Never one to feather his own nest in office, in retirement he lost money on the movie Buddies that he promoted and in which he fleetingly appeared; furthermore, he almost lost his house used as collateral for the heavily indebted Leichhardt Rowing Club.

Controversy had surrounded Pilbeam for most of his public life. In 1953 a spurned lover shot him in the chest at close range and, although he survived, the bullet remained in the muscles of his back. Amid the scandal, which made the national press, Pilbeam resigned as mayor but immediately renominated; he again won, although with a reduced majority. His reputation still tarnished, political rivals objected to his plan to greet the visiting Queen Elizabeth II in March 1954, yet he redeemed himself by leadership and personal rescue efforts in a record flood a few weeks beforehand. The novelist Kenneth Cook fictionalised the events in Vantage to the Gale in the late 1950s, although the British publisher pulped the work before release because of fears it was libellous. Using the pseudonym of Alan Hale, Cook published an amended iteration in 1963.

In 1978 Pilbeam again attracted national attention, this time over his practice of dismissing female council employees on marriage. He believed ‘a woman’s place [was] in the home,’ well-off women worked ‘for sheer greed’ (Guinness 1978, 11, 12), and councils had a civic duty to employ school-leavers. The Municipal Officers’ Association took the case of Janine Marshall, a library assistant, to the Federal Arbitration Commission which found such action ‘breached international convention’ (Morning Bulletin 1977, 1). It failed to order reinstatement, however, and Pilbeam refused to reemploy her. The national media branded ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’ a chauvinist for his outdated views.

Pilbeam’s penchants for telling risqué jokes, boasting about his sexual prowess, and womanising, as well as rumours of illegitimate children, earned him the alternate epithet of ‘Sexy Rexy,’ yet he vehemently opposed what he considered pornography in the city library. The large, moustachioed, dishevelled-in-attire, outspoken mayor—who sniffed, snorted, and scratched during public events—nevertheless possessed charisma that boosted his electoral standing. Few people admitted to voting for him; the majority did until his final campaign.

For the last two years of his life, Pilbeam was in a Brisbane nursing home, wheelchair-bound after the amputation of his right leg. His wife and both sons, Roderick and Alan, having predeceased him, he died on 31 July 1999 at Herston. His ashes were returned to the city he loved for a memorial service at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and interment with those of his ever-loyal wife at the Rockhampton crematorium. To the end, he never resiled from his chauvinistic views and enjoyed entertaining the many women who surrounded him in the nursing home, singing in his rich baritone voice and regaling them with tales of his exploits and famous shooting.

Pilbeam has been acclaimed as the most successful mayor in Rockhampton’s history. As one former CIG member stated, ‘he can be rude, crude and unattractive, but he’s the best thing that ever happened to Rockhampton’ (McGregor 1977, 5). That description reflects, perhaps, why no imperial or national honours came his way; the city, however, is replete with monuments to his long and productive mayoralty.