Australiana auction: Why your old Mambo shirt could be worth hundreds

6 hours ago 4

Dare Jennings, the name behind clothing label Mambo, has enjoyed an illustrious career. In the 1970s, he took the simple T-shirt and worked with leading artists to transfer this piece of cotton into ‘art to wear’.

What started out as this great idea with his business partner Andrew Rich led to other successes, including producing Phantom Records and designing surf gear. A couple of decades later, Jennings established the fashion business Deus Ex Machina, swapping surf for motorbike culture.

Decades after founding Mambo, Dare Jennings established the fashion business Deus Ex Machina, swapping surf for motorbike culture.

Part of this extraordinary legacy will be sold at Shapiro Auctioneers in Sydney on September 23, giving those who recall the Mambo period an opportunity to purchase a piece of nostalgia.

The T-shirts, shirts, record covers, posters and one-off art pieces, including a couple of pinball machines, will go under the hammer. Living the life of a hippie in the 1970s, travelling up and down the New South Wales Coast, Dare reflects on the incidents that started this trajectory.

“A guy gave me a lift in his Mack Truck wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bulldog, something that looked quite different,” says Jennings, who was inspired to start his own line of T-shirts from the shed in his backyard.

A Mambo watch, expected to fetch $1000 at auction.

Fast forward several months of experimenting, and through his connections at art school at COFA (now UNSW Art & Design), Jennings started working with the likes of artists Reg Mombassa (founding member of the band Mental as Anything), Paul Warstead, Robert Moore, Gerry Wedd and David McKay.

“Surf culture was big business at the time,” says Jennings, who expanded his repertoire to include board shorts, Hawaiian shirts and even jackets lined with Mambo’s screen-printed fabrics.

What was then a $20 T-shirt or a $30 Hawaiian shirt (scenes of Hawaii’s coastline) is now worth considerably more. Reg Mombassa’s ‘Loud Shirt’ titled, ‘Popular Biscuits of the Southern Highlands’ is expected to fetch between $400 and $500.

Artwork, including posters and original art for Phantom Record covers, could set you back between $800 and $1,200. For those who never really grew up, there’s an opportunity to buy one of Robert Moore’s hand-painted pinball machines, with a price estimate of between $5,000 and $7,000. Once a store fixture, it includes the word ‘f**k’ emblazoned along one side.

“There’s certainly a sense of nostalgia that comes with this auction, appealing to those who grew up with Mambo. But there’s definitely a younger audience who are now collecting Mambo and pushing up prices,” says Andrew Shapiro, Managing Director of Shapiro Auctioneers in Chippendale.

Unique pieces, including ‘Australian Jesus and the Golden Motorbike’ by Reg Mombassa, will be up for auction in September.

With 150 individual items on sale, from artwork to Mambo watches (expected to sell between $1,000 and $1,500), it will be a feast for those who appreciate the brand’s history and the irreverent Australian humour spawned at that time.

“I was always attracted to Hawaiian scenes, but I was keen to subvert these and send things up,” says Jennings, who, with his stable of artists, somehow managed to come up with quirky titles for each design.

There is ‘Australian Jesus and the Golden Motorbike’ (an off-set print on paper and the artist’s proof expecting to fetch between $3,000 and $5,000) by Reg Mombassa, or ’Rockin Jelly Bean, a Super Deluxe surfboard circa 1998 with a price estimate of between $1,500 and $2,000.

Some of the most nostalgic items in the collection are the shirts and a rare jacket designed for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, with the assistance of the Australian Wool Board. Rather than using Hawaii as a starting point, Mombassa lined the jackets with scenes of Australian suburbia, expected to head north towards $1,000.

While Jennings sold Mambo to the Gazal Corporation in 2000, he still plays a role with Deux Ex Machina. The Australian irreverence exemplified by Mambo is valued by many, and it’s an opportunity for these pieces to engage with a new generation of fans.

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