Robyn and John Rawlinson accept their second successive shield for business excellence in 1998 at The Distributors annual conference in Melbourne. A national industry group representing confectionery wholesalers, The Distributors’ conference was held in different capital cities each year. Photo: Rawlinson family collection.
In corner stores, service stations and newsagents across southern NSW they called him The Candy Man.
John Rawlinson began earning his title when he and his wife Robyn bought their confectionery wholesale business in Goulburn in 1976. The business included a truck from which the previous owner Keith Swadling had operated, collecting his stock which Red Tulip railed from Sydney.
Over the following 24 years the Rawlinsons, helped by their three children and Robyn’s father Jack Bales, served a vast distribution network of 200 corner shops plus other outlets. They increased their turnover from $300,000 to almost $2 million and met larger-than-life characters such as Australia’s foremost jelly lollies creators, the Allseps.
“We were very good friends with Bill and Jean Allsep who established the company,” Robyn said. “They came to visit when they were travelling through; they both had Jaguars and didn’t like to drive up our dirt road, so they came and visited when we were in the warehouse.
“He had a gold Rolls-Royce in his garage and showed us when we went down to Victoria for a conference,” she said.
Four-for-a-cent lollies, soft, sweet witchetty grubs, milkshakes, milk bottles, crumbly bananas and Prydes little tart-like sweets similar to Turkish delight, and fruit creams gave children inside a corner store a glimpse of heaven in the shape of a lolly counter.
“Kids could go and buy 50 cents worth of lollies and get a great big bag full, but now they are two or three cents just for one,” Robyn said.
But not in The Candy Man’s day. In the Nestle factory in Victoria John and Robyn witnessed Violet Crumble bars being made by hand, and Smarties receiving their final sheen from spinning in copper drums that looked like giant golf balls.
John and Robyn started their venture building a small shed for extra stock, and as it grew they were storing even more cartons of lollies in their garage and spare bedroom before building a warehouse at Bradfordville, and later acquiring a more central warehouse previously owned by Wright Heaton in Bradley Street.
All the while they were raising their children Sonya, Brian and Michelle, who helped in the business when they were older. Robyn remembers taking a cot with her to work at the warehouse when Michelle was a baby.
John Rawlinson’s younger brother Matthew dwarfed by cartons containing smaller boxes and bags full of lollies in a small shed the family built when launching their wholesalers business. Photo: Rawlinson family collection.
“We closed the warehouse at 3 o’clock and I would go and pick up the kids from school and we’d go home,” she said.
One afternoon lollies rained down across the road and verge in the split second after a collision with their truck.
“John was going down the highway (Hume Street) South Goulburn, had his blinker on to turn right to the City View store and a Linfox truck smashed into the back of him and split the back of the truck open,” Robyn said.
“Lollies went everywhere. It was 3:30 pm, the school bus had just arrived and kids thought their Christmases had all come at once,” she said. Everything had to be unloaded, repacked into their lounge room while waiting for NSW’s one and only insurance assessor for trucks.
“That was absolutely horrendous,” Robyn said. “Then we had to get a new truck and load everything back into it.”
Among many shop owners who became friends, Robyn recounted Max Frey opposite Goulburn Base Hospital and Paul Cassimatis who opened Paul’s Cafe at Crookwell and later a fish-and-chip shop in Goulburn.
Each year thousands of Easter eggs filled 20 pallets and took an age to check off and prepare for orders. “Every little corner store and cafe had lots of Easter eggs and we would have to sort out all the orders and deliver them,” Robyn said.
John delivered confectionery to Boorowa, Bowning and Yass as well as bigger towns, stopping at newsagents, small supermarkets, pubs and collection points for sports days, school and swimming pool canteens and orders for Christmas parties.
“John had everything on the truck; he very rarely ran out of anything and was pretty much able to go into a shop, take the order, go out into the truck and pack it all up and carry it in,” Robyn said.
The arrival of the Goulburn bypass in 1992, and service stations organising collective purchasing took an edge off the business. In 2000 the Rawlinsons retired, after decades of delivering sweetness far and wide.
