Tapirs and Brands: 1. Tapir Brand Flour, Australia

A new series on the WTD blog is a potted history of tapirs and brands from around the world.  Whilst tapirs are not one of the flagship species that are used in marketing campaigns, they have nonetheless been featured from time to time.  We'd love to hear from you about other brands and marketing campaigns that have featured tapirs - both current and past.

First up is Tapir Brand, a trade mark filed almost a century ago by a flour mill in Western Australia.

On 15 December 1919, the York Flour Milling Company Ltd filed a trade mark for Tapir Brand - one of three filed on that day (the others being Hoopoe Brand and Shuttlecock and Battledore Brand). The brands were presumably filed as part of a plan to expand its range of products.  The filing occurred exactly a century after the Malayan tapir was first described in Western scientific literature by French zoologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest.

Based in the Western Australian town of York, around 100km east of Perth, the company began operations in 1892 as the Empire Milling Company. It began trading as the York Flour Milling Company in 1908, producing 3000 tonnes of flour, 900 tonnes of bran and 450 tonnes of pollard each year at its peak from its four-storey flour mill on Broome Street.

Registered as application 26762, the Tapir Brand trade mark was accepted in the following year on 5 March, registered over fifteen years later on 14 December 1935, and renewed 36 years later on 15 December 1961. Tapir Brand flour, to the best of my knowledge, never made it to market.

The flour mill closed as a working mill in 1967, and served as an arts centre to the local community until recently. Tapir Brand is a footnote in Australian trade mark history of a brand that was never used commercially that was submitted by a regional primary producer that ceased operating almost half a century ago.