The King of the Rink

Roller skating was a popular pastime in Sydney and the rest of Australia, with the earliest rinks introduced in the 1870s. Indeed, footage shot of a roller skater in Sydney’s Prince Alfred Park is believed to be Australia’s earliest surviving film.

Patineur Grotesque, aka The Humourous Rollerskater or The Burlesque Roller Skater, was made by Marius Sestier, a representative of film pioneers the Lumière brothers, during a visit to Australia in September 1896. Within a fortnight of his arrival in Sydney, Sestier opened his ‘Salon Lumière’ at the Lyceum Theatre and it was Australia’s first ever cinema.¹

Another clip from the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia shows a roller skating carnival probably at the Glideway Skating Rink in Melbourne Street, South Brisbane, Queensland.

Despite the ‘vast assemblage’ of people who patronised the Darlinghurst Skating Rink in those first few months, the Evening News reported there was ’not a sign of larrikinism or even rough play’ and skaters retained a level of respectability. The rink’s first ‘grand masquerade’ was held on 22 July 1889, which featured fancy dress and a carnival. Prizes were offered to ’the lady and gentleman who do the best waltz on skates’.²

The second masquerade was ‘simply bewitching’ on 12 August, and featured a range of characters including a Miss Moore, who dressed as a butterfly, Mrs McElhone, as an angel, and Miss Puckle, as an edition of the Argus newspaper in gold lettering. And the prize for the most original dress was awarded to a Mr Ferrier, who dressed as a cabbage garden. Some businesses used these opportunities to dress participants in costumes advertising their brand or products, from cigarettes to bicycles, to paper and boot paste.³

Of equal attraction to the rink itself was its operator – the American ‘champion trick skater of the world’ and ‘King of the Rink’, Robert J Aginton. Born in New York in about 1858, Aginton ‘rinked his way from ‘Frisco [San Francisco] to London’ until he arrived in Australia in the 1880s.⁴

The self-styled ‘Professor Aginton’ was a ‘smart, small, swift, muscular manly man; keen-sighted, sure-footed, and with plenty of nerve’. Just over two months prior to the opening of the Darlinghurst Skating Rink, he had stunned audiences with ‘his wonderful flight on ball-bearing skates down an incline’ 130 feet long by 42 inches wide. According to one newspaper, he could spin on his skates at 300 revolutions a minute, and he later claimed he earned £100 per week to appear at one Sydney rink.⁵

Read the next part of the story.