Update 13 August: I did look into it, I asked my father about it. He said that his mother did bookkeeping for a number of small businesses including this one, Village Bell Press, essentially a printing firm (which must have in some way been referencing the Village Bell hotel, which was nearby, though apparently it wasn't the same business). Through that business she heard about a cottage on the premises being available for rent and told my parents about it, and that is why we were living there. I don't need you, dear reader, to care much about this but I was surprised to hear that my grandmother, the much loved and missed Mavis, worked at anything after getting married, although I knew she was more educated than many of her friends/cohort. According to my father she had no actual qualifications to do bookkeeping.
Rather extraordinarily, I discover from an early 1937 issue of Smiths Weekly that thirty years before, in late 1934, the Village Belle [sic] Press of St Kilda printed a book entitled Hael, Odin! by one 'Tasman Forth' (Barbara Winter's book on the Australia First Movement tells me that this is Alexander Rud Mills, a Tasmanian-born solicitor who had met and talked with Hitler who he found to have 'a strong sense of deep kindness')* associated with the Anglecyn [sic] Body of the British Empire. As far as Smith's is concerned, the book is evidence of Australian Nazism, and some choice quotes suggest there is certainly not a little antisemitism (Smith's is more worried by the anti-Christianity) involved. The book had a gold swastika embossed on its cover.
Give the VBP the benefit of the doubt, they were surely a printing business not a publisher, and the association with Mills is more likely than not to have been a business arrangement, not the sign of an ideological commitment. I'd like to think that if I ran Village Bell Press in 1934 I wouldn't have printed a Nazi book but there were a lot of people smarter than I'll ever be who did much worse things than that back then (I should also point out that the Smith's article refers to Village Belle press, and that Winter also refers to the press by this name, but since Winter was unable to find a copy of the book itself, she is probably going by a Smith's typo. But it might also not be a typo; maybe someone faked up a 'Village Belle Press' sneakily. I doubt that but who knows). As the Smith's article points out, Nazi ideology was greatly respected by Australian federal and state governments in the 1930s so to print a poetry book of this nature in the middle of that decade was hardly flying in the face of either the establishment or the law at this time.
I want to know more, and when I do, so shall you.
Update 14 August: I had a look at a copy of this book, and it is unsurprisingly quite terrible. Because I was mildly unwell yesterday (don't ask me, I have no idea, I'm fine now) I had a lot of opportunity to do a modicum of research into Mills and his nefarious career. I will write something up in due season. I won't subject you to the innards of Hael, ODIN! though here's the outard:
One more thing. I called my father to tell him about the Village Bell Press' shame and for some reason this dislodged a memory for him: 'Vaughan. The man who ran the press was named Vaughan.'
*B Winter The Australia First Movement Glass House Books, Carindale 2005
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