A Foreign Affair: The Chevron ‘Traveller’ Portable Typewriter

On Saturday, an old photograph of Australia’s new Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, appeared in an article about Carr in The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age magazine, The Good Weekend.
Carr was pictured with a small manual portable typewriter at his desk at The Bulletin magazine in the late 1970s.

For those not aware of the Australia Government’s squalid political plotting of the past two years, Carr was earlier this month parachuted into the Senate here in Canberra so he could succeed former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Carr, seen here with Abe Lincoln,

 was a charter member of the Chester A. Arthur Society*

*Wikipedia says this is "a US political trivia group named after the US president, 1881-1885"

Carr, as the New South Wales Labor nominee for the Senate, replaced Mark Arbib, who had resigned following an unsuccessful bid by Rudd to win back the prime ministership, a position to which he was democratically elected by the popular vote of this country in 2007. In this month's attempt to regain his position, Rudd was soundly beaten in the caucus vote and duly sent packing to the back benches. Arbib was one of “Labor's faceless men” who had plotted against Rudd to make Julia Gillard Australia’s first female prime minister in June 2010.

Carr, who was Premier of New South Wales from 1995-2005, is a former journalist. He worked for ABC Radio’s AM and PM current affairs programs 1969-71, and was an industrial affairs and political reporter for The Bulletin from 1978-83.

Anyway, enough of such trivial stuff as Australian politics. Now for the important business of typewriters.
When the Carr photo appeared in The Good Weekend, friends asked me to identify the typewriter he is seen using.

At first glance, I was about 95 per cent certain it was a Chevron, but I had to leave work during a tea break last night, go to my storage place in Fyshwick and dig out the typewriter in question to confirm this was indeed the one and the same machine.

This Chevron is a Nakajima Model AT-3002. It is exactly the same machine as the Olympiette 2 and 3, except the metal is cream-coloured, whereas the Olympiette 3 came in orange, the same colour as that favoured for the Olympia Traveller de Luxe. The Olympiette 2 had black trimming around white-coloured metal, as was the case with the earlier Olympia Traveller de Luxe.

Olympia had Nakajima make the Olympiettes as a down-market version of the Traveller de Luxe. The clever people at Nakajima simply took its standard all-purpose machine – which is seen in about 1000 different guises – flattened the ribbon cover and put white plastic sides on.

The basic design for the casing was done for Olympia Werke in Wilhelmshaven, West Germany, in 1969, by Alfons Boothby and Georges Joseph. It was influenced by Carl Sundberg's design of the Remington Monarch and one of Karl Tillman Baughman's designs (see Sears "Throwback" portable typewriter post on this blog).

Olivetti later acquired the design and adapted it to make its Tropical and Roma portable typewriters in Brazil.

Nakajima, always ready to make a machine of any outward appearance for anyone who asked, but always using its vast stock of basic mechanics, made this particular model as a Chevron for Australia consumption.
To the best of my knowledge, the Chevron typewriter brand name is not associated with Caltex and Woolworths. It uses an entirely different logo, for one thing.

It seems more likely to have been a brand variation used by Sears, which had a close relationship with Nakajima, and to have been used in Australia through Kmart, Target and Coles stores, as well as Waltons and Grace Brothers. I may be wrong, and if anyone can enlighten me to the contrary, please let me know.
All of the Chevron typewriters seen in this country are Nakajima machines, and many are the same models as marketed in the US as Sears and Grants typewriters. Nakajima certainly shared its favours around.

Getting back to the Bob Carr article briefly. The story in The Good Weekend about Carr working at The Bulletin was written by Robert Drewe (above), who worked at The Bulletin from 1975-77 and 1980-83. Drewe and I had worked together at The Australian in Sydney from 1969-1973 and we remained friends for many years after that. Drewe went on to become one of Australia’s best novelists. In that regard, I suppose, he could be compared with John Banfield, with whom I worked in Dublin (as mentioned in my previous, St Patrick’s Day post). Both novelists worked in newspapers to pay the rent (or mortgage) while finding a way to make a living from serious writing.
PS: A blogger who identifies typewriters used in movies asked me a week or so ago about the one Johnny Depp uses in the latest Hunter S.Thompson film, The Rum Diary. In my post on this, I simply called it a Najakima, but apparently it has a Royal nameplate. I pointed out that we tend to label all Nakajima machines as Nakajimas, since mechanically they are all the same typewriter. I'm going to start an inventory of the many dozens of Nakajima variations, starting with Royal, Imperial, Achiever, AusRoyal, ALL, Chevron, Craftomatic, Magitouch, Mustang, Pinnock, Sovereign. Of course, many Silver-Seiko machines were also made with the same design. Any more for any more?