Peter Hackworth and The Primitif: An origins story

This blog was written by 2022 Letty Katts Fellow, Dr Leah Cotterell. 

Peter Hackworth has been operating restaurants and market businesses continuously for 67 years, since she first opened The Primitif Coffee Lounge at the age of 21. This blog is based on interviews and conversations about the foundations of her outstanding career and features images from Peter’s personal collection now scanned into the collection of the SLQ. The photos of The Primitif were taken by Kevin Anderson and the research is part of the 2022 Letty Katts Fellowship. 

There’s a strong chance that an instinct for business runs in Peter’s blood. Her mother, Marie Josephine Stewart Meek, known as Jo, was the owner of beauty parlours in the 1940s. Jo’s first shop, called Carmen Joyce, was in Edward Street in the city. She then moved to Heindorf House where Peter was sometimes looked after as a child in the free space on the roof of the building.  

Tragically, Peter’s father died suddenly a few weeks before she was born. John Percival Cox, arrived in Brisbane after many adventures. He had flown with the RAF during World War I and after the war worked for the British Government in India building railways. Taking a less predictable turn in life, he had joined a Shakespearean theatre company in Sydney as an actor, then moved to Brisbane to work as a radio announcer on 4BC presenting his own program titled “The Adventures of Peter”. It was Jo and John’s intention to name their child Peter if they had a son. After John died and a daughter was born, Jo kept the name.  

So, on both sides of Peter Hackworth’s parentage, there was initiative and energy, a taste for adventure and terrific resilience. 

When Peter was still a child, Jo bought a motel at Palm Beach. They were living in a beachouse on the waterfront when Peter left school at the age of 12 and for a while she drifted. She liked food and she cooked for the guests at the motel. A lonely, dreamy kid she would go out walking all day on the beach singing to herself. Peter says the only things that she wanted to do as a teenager was to be either a sailor or an opera singer, but neither path was open to her.  

When Peter was 16 Jo bought a block of flats at Hamilton and they moved back to Brisbane. Jo organised a job for Peter as a receptionist at the Commonwealth Bank in Queen Street. She was good at the work, charming and efficient, but she did not enjoy it. Then she tried nursing for a time at the Royal Brisbane Hospital and was working in the children’s ward. But this was during the polio crisis, and the work made her sad. The children often seemed lonely and many were far from their families. Later she tried hostessing at El Morocco nightclub. But none of it held any appeal. 

Fundamentally Peter didn’t want to be told what to do. She was restless, focused on pursuing her own tastes and interests, especially her sense of style. Anyone you speak to who knew her as a young woman says the same thing, almost word for word. Peter was tall, beautiful, stylish and very individual in her tastes. When she walked into a room everyone noticed. She was a knockout and in a big country town like Brisbane she stood out. “It was very conservative in those days. Yes. I remember. I bought from America all these colored stockings, bright blue, and I used to wear them in the street … I dressed how I liked. Always”. 

She wasn’t excited about dating young men, and one night at a restaurant called The Gypsy Baron, Peter met the owner, George Weinsburg, a lapsed Austrian Baron more than twice her age. George’s full name was Baron Von Weinsberg Zuwein Hartenzberg and he had a couple of things going for him. He’d been taught to sing by the most famous operatic tenor of his day, Richard Tauber, and he was European and aristocratic. Peter was 19 and intrigued, “ … it fascinated me … because of his age, I sort of thought all Europeans were like him. He used to wear makeup and curl his eyelashes and do his hair…” In the next year or so, George would move his business to a new venue, La Boheme nightclub. Peter Cox as she was then would see how hospitality worked at George’s La Boheme.  

Peter and George married in 1956. The marriage only lasted a year, but it produced Peter’s first child, her daughter Michaele.  

By this time, Peter had accrued a wide network of friends, people in radio, commercial art, nightclubs and music. She went to lots of parties with an older set who were involved in modern art, Neville Matthews, Don Ross, Arthur Gunthorpe, Roy and Betty Churcher and John Molvig. “I had a black and gold cheongsam with gold pants underneath. Just what I felt like at the time … I used to go to all the artists' parties.” 

Now single again and caring for her infant daughter with support from Jo, what Peter needed was to do something for herself. Michaele was six months old when Peter received a payout from an insurance policy her mother had taken out. “What she did is when I was born, she took out an insurance on my life for when I turned 21, I'd get a thousand pounds.” With this stake was able to rent the basement room of the Picadilly arcade at 340 Queen Street. Her ambition was to create a place that was different to everything else, with everything that she liked in one place. 

The Primitif had trendy Modernist décor: a dramatic look in shades of grey, in the bold stripes on the seats and the cubist influenced figures in the mural Richard Werner designed and installed. For a note of colour, she knocked up a set of table lamps, using driftwood and making orange shades with fringes. 

Then she hired the most interesting people she could find: a French chef, Louis the Hungarian waiter, and two Italian baristas to take care of her espresso machine (the first in town). She says that everyone she hired, taught her something about business.  

The Primitif was an immediate success. 

Financially, The Primitif gave Peter her independence. She recalls the business was making £1000 a day. She worked hard, long hours, but she was able to take breaks to jump in her little car and drive up Queen Street through Breakfast Creek to Hamilton to look after Michaele.  

She says that five days of the week, they worked to make the money, so that on Sundays she could have the music and entertainment that she craved. “We used to get crowded down there. They used to bring their own cushions and sit on the stage ... Sit on coffee tins, anything … I suppose there wasn't much around in Brisbane at that stage.” 

So many aspects of The Primitif were extraordinary in the context of Brisbane at that time and Peter had blow ins from all around Australia. Barry Humphries found her there, and Barry Crocker and Peter Allen did some of their early gigs in the corner of The Primitif. 

Something I learnt only very recently was that Peter named her café The Primitif inspired by a very appealing, chic, seductive advertisement for a Max Factor perfume released in 1956. 

Peter surely saw herself in this image. She was beautiful and bold. She dressed as she wished to. Not really extroverted, but assured, Peter knew what she wanted.  

Peter was an extraordinary young woman, and she manifested all of her brightest talents in her first business, a venture that launched her into a life of creating successful, innovative, trendsetting businesses, always ahead of their time. 

Dr Leah Cotterell, 2022 Letty Katts Fellow.

If you have any photographs, ephemera or other material related to The Primitif Cafe, please consider donating it to our John Oxley Library collection. Please contact qldmemory@slq.qld.gov.au. 

Collections

• 32929 Peter Hackworth photographs and ephemera
• 34130 Rick Fabach scrapbooks and photographs
• Farbach, R (1999). Cleftomania: a disease that attacks musicians and makes them do strange things. Oracle Press, 1999.

Other blogs by Dr Leah Cotterell

• The Primitif Coffee Shop: young, hip and gorgeous in 1950s Brisbane

• From satin gowns to jazz advocacy – remembering Paula Langlands

• Rick Farbach: Riding a musical wave from Riga to Surfers Paradise

• Jazz, the beating heart of The Primitif