Australian Dictionary of Biography

Laurie Wall, c. 1955

National Library of Australia, photographed by Jeff Carter

Lawrance Anderson Wall (1913–2000), real estate agent and land speculator, was born on 28 January 1913 at Woollahra, Sydney, son of New South Wales-born parents Jeremiah Wall, tram conductor and later publican, and his wife Florence Maud, née Anderson. Growing up around his father’s hometown of Mudgee, Laurie was a keen sportsman, excelling as a roller skater and cricketer. He attended De La Salle College, Orange, and St Stanislaus’ College, Bathurst (1926–28), where he was a theological student. After a brief period apprenticed to a pharmacist at Orange, he moved to Sydney and obtained employment as a real estate agent at Bondi. In February 1937 he was charged with behaving indecently and assaulting a young woman, Evelyn Calcutt; the jury acquitted him of indecency but could not agree on the assault charge. The notable barrister Bill Dovey, KC, had led his defence.

In September 1938 Wall was appointed as a patrol officer in the Public Service of Papua. He resigned in April the following year shortly before his conviction in May of the manslaughter of a Papuan man, whom he had punched in the stomach, rupturing his enlarged spleen. Wall’s sentence of six months imprisonment was suspended, and he returned to Sydney, where he resumed selling real estate at Bondi.

Wall had another encounter with the law, during World War II, being convicted and fined in March 1941 for possessing and selling forged petrol ration tickets. Later that year, on 24 November, he married Patricia Helen Smith, a hairdresser, at St Anne’s Shrine, Bondi Beach. Beginning full-time duty in the Citizen Military Forces in December, he served in Sydney in the 2nd Military District Accounts Office until March 1942 when he was discharged as being required for an essential occupation. He later stated that this involved driving busloads of workers between Katoomba and the Commonwealth Small Arms Factory at Lithgow.

After the war, Wall bought the Tudor Private Hotel at Forster on the mid-north coast with his parents. Then, from 1950, he ran Manning Motors, a garage and dealership at Taree. In 1952 he accused an employee, Ernest Murdoch, of stealing from the business. Charged and acquitted, Murdoch sued Wall for malicious prosecution, claiming that he had supplied false information to the police to prevent Murdoch from starting a competing business. The jury found in Murdoch’s favour and the court ordered Wall to pay him £2,500 in damages. Having divorced in late 1948, Wall married Daphne Coral Campbell on 11 December 1950 at St Paul’s Church of England, Nabiac. They had one daughter, Laurice, in 1953.

Wall moved to Queensland in 1954. By July he was living on what would soon be named the Gold Coast, speculating in land and operating the Monte Carlo Café at Southport. On earlier visits, he had been impressed by the region’s mild climate and natural beauty. Like many a fortune hunter, he had seen opportunities to amass wealth from its principal industries: tourism and residential development. His timing was propitious. Except during two short recessions, the Gold Coast was to boom for the next twenty-seven years. In 1956, after several months working for a real estate agency, he left to start his own firm, later incorporated as Laurie Wall Pty Ltd, at Surfers Paradise.

Long office hours, innovative salesmanship, and shrewd buying and selling on his own behalf would bring Wall the riches he craved. When competing agents questioned his record sales, he took out full-page advertisements in the South Coast News listing the names of the vendors and addresses of their properties. The Gold Coast Bulletin dubbed him ‘Mr Millions’ and rendered his name as ‘£aurie.’ Diversifying, he started a riding school, built a roller-skating rink, and owned a succession of racehorse studs. In 1965, when Justice Sir Douglas Menzies of the High Court of Australia dismissed four of Wall’s appeals, and part of a fifth, against income tax assessments, he observed that, as a witness, Wall ‘though confident … was ready to mislead when he thought it to be in his interests’ (NAA J406). He was reported to have been acquitted of fraud charges in the Supreme Court of Queensland in 1964. That year he also sold his real estate business, though in 1970 he would start a new agency, specialising in acreage, at Nerang. On 7 December 1966, only a few months after being divorced, he married Kay Dorothy McKenzie, a secretary thirty-one years his junior, at his Carrara residence on the Gold Coast.

Wall was typical of a class of businessmen who operated at the fringes of legality on the Gold Coast in the second half of the twentieth century. In later years he was proud that many of his clients had become permanent residents and gone on to sell their land at a profit. He believed that his most important contribution to the region was to persuade the developer Stanley Korman to invest there. In 1983 the Surfers Paradise Chamber of Commerce honoured Wall with a Community Achievement award for his ‘infectious enthusiasm,’ which had led people to settle in the town.

Described as ‘a born raconteur’ (Phillips 1988, 1) with ‘a messianic fervour that is almost hypnotic’ (McRobbie 1984, 77), Wall stood at five feet five and a half inches (166 cm) and had thick, fair (later white) hair, a high forehead, hawk nose, and pointed chin. He had a good singing voice and enjoyed water skiing into his seventies. In 1988 an Albert Ricardo caricature accentuated his deep suntan and the expensive, ostentatious jewellery that adorned his neck, wrist, and fingers. Others found him less pretentious, one journalist observing that he did ‘not give the impression of a multi-million dollar business magnate’ (Kennedy 1980, 4). Around 1987, complaining about sexual immorality, increasing crime, and growing numbers of foreigners on the Gold Coast, he moved inland to Boonah, where he owned a motel. He died at the local hospital on 2 October 2000 and, following a Catholic funeral, was buried in the town’s lawn cemetery. His wife and daughter survived him. Adopted as an infant, Helen Russell (b. 1945) later identified as the natural daughter of Wall and Dorothy Alderson.