Australian Dictionary of Biography

Joseph Pinter (1912-1981), engineer and businessman, was born on 24 May 1912 at Kolozsvár, Hungary (Cluj, Romania), son of Jewish parents Bartholomeus Pinter and his wife Blanche, née Fischer; the family were prosperous flour-millers. Joseph graduated from the Technische Hochschule Berlin in 1935 as an electrical engineer and worked in Romania as a technical representative for foreign companies.

On 15 July 1937 Pinter married Berlin-born Gerda Baruch (1915-2003), a medical student. Acquiring her husband’s Romanian citizenship, she was denied permission to remain in Germany as a foreign student. Her parents, sister and brother-in-law had previously migrated to Paraguay. In May 1938 Joseph and Gerda applied for a permit to enter Australia, stating on their application his intended occupation: ‘the founding of an electromechanical enterprise having enough capital and being an expert in that specialty’. They arrived in Melbourne in May 1939, after a period in England, bringing £1000 to fund the business.

Setting up a small plant at Carlton, Melbourne, under licence from an English company, Arc Manufacturing Co. Ltd, Pinter manufactured portable electric welding machines under the trade name ACTARC. In 1940, after the fall of France, the London firm advised that they could no longer source material for coating welding rods, needed in the war effort, but that they understood rutile could be obtained from the coastal mineral sands of northern New South Wales. Pinter designed a separator to produce pure rutile from a concentrate of rutile and ilmenite, from ore obtained from Zircon-Rutile Ltd, Byron Bay. This first commercial production of separated rutile in Australia met a strong wartime demand from firms in Australia and Britain. Seeking new sources of rutile, he then devised an electrostatic machine to separate rutile and zircon and used other suppliers, Mineral Deposits Syndicate in Queensland and Coffs Harbour Minerals Syndicate.

At the declaration of war the Pinters had been classed as enemy aliens; their status was then revised to ‘refugee alien’. They were naturalised on 15 May 1945. Gerda completed an X-ray technicians’ course and for a time worked as a radiographer. In 1946 Pinter and others set up Associated Minerals Pty Ltd to mine mineral sands principally at Broadbeach, Queensland, and to extract rutile and zircon. The Pinters moved to Surfers Paradise in 1947. With a 50 per cent interest in the company, he was managing director. Ian Morley observed that ‘Joe Pinter’s combination of technical expertise and business acumen’ was crucial to the firm’s success, as were his extensive overseas trips on which he met potential customers in Britain, Europe and the United States of America.

In 1953 Pinter and his partners formed a public company, Associated Minerals Consolidated Ltd, to fund the expansion of the enterprise, both at leases at Cudgen and through the 1960s by the acquisition of other firms. Resources were substantially increased in 1961, when Consolidated Gold Fields (Australia) Pty Ltd acquired a 50 per cent interest in the operation. Gerald Mortimer of Consolidated Gold Fields said of their choice of an alliance partner: ‘Associated Minerals appeared to have the strongest management’. Pinter stepped down as managing director in 1977 but remained on the board. By that time Associated Minerals was the largest sand-mining and processing company in the world. Survived by his wife and their son and daughter, Pinter died of myocardial infarction on 25 March 1981 in their home at Main Beach and was cremated with Unitarian forms.

Gerda Pinter, who was interested in theatre, became the Gold Coast Little Theatre’s director of productions in 1950. She was a founder of the South Coast Children’s Arts Theatre and co-founder of the Queensland Theatre of Puppetry. The Pinters had a long-sustained ability to bring people of similar cultural interests together. The Pinters, Bruce Duncan, and Malcolm Cummings, ‘the Founding Four’, late in 1968 established a group to develop a local cultural centre for theatre and the visual arts. Eventually, on 6 December 1986, the Gold Coast Arts Centre was opened.

Active in many community activities, Mrs Pinter was also a speech and drama adjudicator, graduate of the University of Queensland (BA, 1994), Lifeline telephone counsellor and office volunteer for the Gold Coast IndyCar Grand Prix. She was named Gold Coast Citizen of the Year (1989) and was awarded the OAM (1992). The Gerda Pinta OAM Pavilion for puppetry was dedicated to her in 2001. Survived by her children, she died on 7 October 2003 in her home at Main Beach. Her estate provided generous benefactions to local institutions and Queensland branches of national charities.