Sculptor Lyall Randolph with Lynette Whillier and mermaid statue

In Search of Lyall Randolph
When we wanted to know more about Lyall Randolph, we came up to a something of a blank wall - his origins were a bit of a mystery, until our researchers started to dig a bit further. The reason was because his full name was "Lyall Randolph Williams", which he referred to himself up until the early 1950s. Over the years he used variations of two, or all of his names, as his public persona, sometimes even using just "Randolf". At some stage, he took to using his middle name as a surname, and became Lyall Randolph, now best known as the creator of Bondi's iconic Mermaid statues.

According to a family tree on Ancestry.com Lyall Randolph Williams was born on the 21 September 1901 at the Sydney suburb of Petersham, New South Wales. This is confirmed by the NSW Births, Deaths & Marriages online index, which shows he was the son of Harold and Annie (nee Goodall) Williams of Petersham, the eldest of five children.

He grew up in the Bondi area, however, where he had many family connections.

Lyall apparently was an accomplished ice skater in his earlier years. The Referee newspaper noted in 1939, that one could buy a copy of a book he wrote called Art of Ice Skating for two shillings from Swains Limited bookshop in Pitt Street Sydney (although a copy never made it to the shelves of the National Library of Australia). He became a devotee of the renowned Australian ice skater Pat Gregory, but there is no indication of whether he had any personal associations with her.

Penniless Art Student
In a long interview with the Sydney Sun newspaper in 1930, Lyall provides a reasonably full description of his early life. According to the then 30 -year-old, he was an unemployed electrician, an "expert", he claimed, who had graduated from a technical college. He said that during his career he fitted out the wireless equipment on the Australian naval ship HMAS Albatross and the power station for the Sydney City North telephone exchange.

By 1930, he was studying sculpture at the East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School). With the effects of the Depression biting hard, he had so little money that he needed to walk to and from his classes at the College each day from Glebe (a considerable walking distance) where he had moored a large boat that he had built and shared with a friend as accommodation. For one of his class projects Lyall created a small sculpture of the body of a nude woman Australian Rhythm However, he was so poor, that he could not afford to have the clay fired and had to keep it "wet" for six weeks.

Builds Successful Business
Then, one of his teachers, the noted Australian artist and sculptor Rayner Hoff (1894 - 1937), [see Note No. 1] heard that he was an electrician and engaged Lyall to rewire his home. The proceeds from this job not only gave Lyall the funds to fire his sculpture but allowed him to finish his studies and to create a portfolio so that he was commissioned by the lady's underwear firm Berlei Limited. His work was featured in window displays for the then big Sydney department store of Farmer's. More commissions followed and he soon had a studio at Hurlstone Avenue, Hurlstone Park, (apparently a shed on his father's suburban property) filling orders for new customers.

In those early days he saw the Australian Rhythm sculpture piece, which he painted a golden bronze, as something of a personal artistic motif. The golden female nude was a theme that he would return to several times over this career.

Lyall Randolph Williams with his sculpture "Australian Rhythm", 1930

There is little that can be found of Lyall during the 1940s. Too young for World War One, and too old for World War Two service, he does not appear on any of the Australian War Memorial databases. But he did enter the Art Gallery of New South Wales Wynne Prize for Sculpture in 1942 and was displayed as one of the finalists with his bust of General Douglas Macarthur.

Self-Promoter
There was always a whiff of the self-promoter about Lyall. He seems to have favoured the idea of "build it and they will come" - his modus operandi was to find an artistic subject with the likelihood of some public interest, create it, and then offer it to an institution in the hope that this would result in remuneration, publicity, or fresh commissions, or maybe all three. He was described in his family history a "a romantic butterfly, chasing his Queen of Hearts, [an] an elusive quest for creativity, adventure, fame and fortune. During his career he created busts of people such as Princess Margaret, Winston Churchill, Cardinal Mannix, baritone Peter Dawson, JFK, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, General Montgomery, Pope Pius XII and Dawn Fraser.

Lyall became a father at some stage. According to the family history of the Williams', he had one daughter, Annie, who was adopted by his sister, Jean Hilda Ivy Williams and her husband Leslie Oliver Warner. She later became Annie Lotoki, who had a career as a theatre and arts administor on Queensland's Gold Coast.

1954 notice from Lyall Randolph advertising the sale of personalised bas-relief images

So it was that by the early 1950s, Lyall was living in Brisbane. One project he had on the boil involved creating a bust of Sister Elizabeth Kenny (1880 - 1952) a self-trained Australian bush nurse who developed an approach to treating polio symptoms in children. He offered the bust to Toowoomba City Council for free. There followed a series of newspaper articles about the long and tortuous journey of the bust from "his studio" to Toowoomba on bumpy roads with misplaced road signs which resulted in damage to the bust. It eventually made it to Toowoomba and for a time at least was on display at the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery. Among the published letters he wrote to newspaper editors was one in 1954 campaigning for a bust of the Aboriginal man Yirra-ka-la and his wife Bedooree of Broadbeach, Queensland.

It has been said about him that he was also an inventor. One invention was a type of pillow, designed for infants, which pumped air through it to simulate sounds a child would hear in the in the womb and thus encourage the child to relax and go to sleep. The National Archives of Australia also has a record of him lodging a copyright application in April 1957 for a musical Wann Kommen Sie, (German for "When are they coming?").

Bankruptcy
Then in June 1957, the federal government Commonwealth Gazette noted that a sequestration order (Number 210 of 1957) had been issued for Lyall Randolph, of Flat 3, number 1 Denham Street, Bondi, electrician. In other words, Lyall was facing the prospect of bankruptcy. One thing the order shows is that by then, Lyall was living in Bondi.

Despite this setback, in 1958 he looks like he was back on his feet. He created a bust of the then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies which garnered quite a lot of publicity. The left-wing Communist Party of Australia run newspaper the Tribune said that he would try and sell this bust in London. They noted, tartly, that "Seems to us it would be more fitting to mould his mellon in "pig-iron," and send it to Kishi in Tokyo".

The following year his bust of the acclaimed Australian writer and journalist Dame Mary Gilmore (1865 - 1962), was exhibited at Parramatta's Art Society's 1959 autumn exhibition. That same year at the Parramatta Youth Centre at 100 Macquarie Street, Parramatta, Lyall was appointed as the Director of a school of sculpture and pottery, aimed at encouraging the artistic endeavours of Parramatta's youth. This was one of a number of times he tried his hand at teaching art.

Lyall Randolph Williams

Bondi Mermaids Conceived
By 1959 Lyall planning, arguably, the most memorable work of his career, the iconic Bondi Mermaids. The two statues were modelled on two local women: Jan Carmody (Miss Australia Surf in 1959); and Lynette Whillier, champion swimmer and runner-up in the same contest. Though the models remained clothed during their sittings, as was Lyall's custom, the statues featured two young nude women. They were constructed of fiberglass, filled with cement and made a bronze-gold colour, with of course, the addition of mermaid's tails.

Bondi's Golden Mermaids

Lyall pitched the idea of the mermaid sculpture to Waverley Council, at his own expense, but the Council refused to accept them on any land it controlled. Lyall wound his way through the State Government bureaucracy trying to find something resembling permission. He had the mermaids installed on Big Rock at Ben Buckler, on the northern shore of Bondi because, he claimed, they were placed a certain distance offshore the space they occupied was not under the jurisdiction of Waverley Council, but the Department of Lands. He also claimed that the Department of Lands had approved the statues. He was in very murky bureaucratic waters, so to speak.

Lynette Whillier & Jan Carmody pose for Mermaid Sculpture

A mere month after they were installed Mermaid Jan was chiselled from the rock by university students as part of a Commemoration Day prank. She was later recovered from the Engineering School, Sydney University. Repaired, she was restored to the Big Rock to rejoin her fellow mermaid Lynette. The cost of the repair was met by public subscription.

Heavy seas claimed Lynette in 1974, swept of the Big Rock in a storm she disappeared forever. Jan lost an arm and her tail in the same storm. Two years later, Waverley Council removed what was left of her in 1976, and stored her in a Council depot where she was forgotten for many years.

What remains of Mermaid Jan in a glass case at Waverley Library

In the late 1980s she was moved to Waverley Library, where, in 1989, the Friends of Waverley Library paid for her remains to be preserved. Jan the mermaid remains on public display at Waverley Library today, held safe in her Perspex box.

Three Sisters Fountain Sculpture, Katoomba
After the mermaid sagq, Lyall was commissioned in 1966 to create a large public work at Katoomba. It included three female figures atop large rocks from which water flowed, a depiction of the The Three Sisters natural rock formation on the opposing headland at Echo Point. The Three Sisters Fountain at the Scenic Skyway and Railway was built as a tourist attraction and also as attraction to raise money to aid The Blue Mountains Handicapped Children's Centre. It was floodlit at night and a 20c coin in the slot produced the spoken legend (versions of the Dreamtime Aboriginal story about the Three Sisters). The larger figures were 7 ft tall and weighed half a ton each. It was removed as part of the Scenic World redevelopment in 2004.

Three Sisters Fountain at Katoomba

Death
The Three Sisters statues may have been Lyall's last significant work. He moved to the New South Wales Central Coast and lived out his days in a caravan at Ettalong Beach. The Canberra Times reported that Lyall Randolph was found dead in a caravan at Ettalong on Thursday 13th February 1975. According to a video interview with Jan Carmody on the "Bondi History Channel" Lyall was bitten by a dog while living in a caravan park at Ettalong and died as a result of a resultant infection rather than seeking medical help. Another version, in a letter to his family quoted in a family history, he said his dog had bitten him on finger down to the bone and he went to Gosford Hospital for treatment. One way or another he succumbed to his injury and died because of an infection.

Lyall Randolph Williams craved fame as a noted artist and sculptor, although at times it may have seemed to have been a mixture of being a minor celebrity or notoriety. But over the decades, memories of his fiberglass and cement mermaids have lingered and grown in the public's perception, ensuring Lyall achieved, in the afterlife, something of the renown he sought in life.

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