A Short history of the Bowdens of the Nautilus

This short history of Max and Diana Bowden sets the scene for the play.

Cornelia Diana Selby-Bigge was born in 1922 in the small village of Kingston in East Sussex. Daughter of artists, Sir John & Lady Ruth, Diana grew up in rural Britain, then lived in Austria, where she was educated and became proficient in European languages.

Fleeing the rise of the Nazis, the family moved to Portugal before returning to England. At eighteen Diana was recruited to work at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the Department of Defence section for de-coding enemy messages. At the end of the war, Diana ended up in Berlin as an interpreter – she spoke fluent French and German and some Portuguese and Italian. This is where she met Max.

Hugh Max Bowden was born in 1909 in Didsbury, Lancashire. When his father died, the family fell on hard times and Max was taken out of private school and sent to work on the hill farms of Northumberland.

It was a hard existence for a thirteen-year-old and in later years he recalled these times as a formative period when he learned how to survive. At fifteen he ‘ran-off’ and got work as a stoker on a steamship, ending up in Australia in the depths of the Depression.

He worked at whatever job he could find – poultry farming, digging post holes for a telegraph line, spending months alone in the bush. He tried Opal Mining and even found work in a theatre troupe. He returned to England where he took up farming in Northumberland and married an Australian girl, Sheila Hawkins.

With the coming of the War, Max enlisted and was in many of the major conflicts at El Alamein, in Lebanon and he participated in D. Day. At war’s end, because of his farming experience, Max worked in Berlin in the dairy reconstruction scheme. There he met Diana.

They eloped to Australia, leaving Sheila and her six-month old baby. They ended up in Garadunga, near Innisfail, and attempted to grow bananas. Max divorced Sheila and married Diana in the pouring rain. The banana venture was washed out and after a succession of odd jobs, they settled in Port Douglas, where Max worked on the Sugar Wharf and Diana found work as a waitress.

Diana spent time beachcombing for shells, fashioning them into jewellery which came to the attention of a visiting socialite. Very quickly the jewellery became popular and burgeoned into an amazing business, at one point employing fourteen local girls as the jewellery found markets in New York, Paris and London.

They built The Nautilus Restaurant beside the established boutique and factory in 1954, the year their first daughter, Melissa, was born.

Diana’s hospitality became legendary, attracting celebrities and eccentrics, but eventually the business became too busy for the couple to handle. The restaurant was leased to a succession of extraordinary people: George Welch and Colin Bryant, Jean & Bart Allen, Bill Austen and John Heywood, Joan Whalley and Diane Cilento.

When Max and Diana’s second daughter was born in 1963, they scaled back the shell jewellery business, but continued to run the Nautilus Boutique and Max established the Exotic Fruit and Flower Nursery, finding markets in the Southern States. In 1968, Max was reconciled with Anna, the daughter from his first marriage, when she visited Australia.

Max never returned to England. Diana visited Melissa when she married and settled in London. Max and Diana lived out the remainder of their lives in Port Douglas and are buried side by side in the Port Douglas cemetery. Their legacy of style and panache and the greening of Flagstaff Hill has left an indelible mark on Port Douglas as it evolved into the international tourist destination it is today.

Festival Archives 2009