SATURDAY BREAKFAST #10 - SMITH STREET, COLLINGWOOD (BETWEEN VICTORIA PARADE and GERTRUDE STREET)

Visited 22 October, 2011

One time in the 1970s, when I was a Partner of the accounting firm Irish Young & Outhwaite, I was asked to deliver an after-dinner address to a group of recruits.  These were the new university graduates who had recently been hired by the firm around Australia, and who were attending a week-long orientation course in Melbourne.  There was to be a final semi-formal dinner, with the obligatory speaker accompanying the coffee, and I was that speaker.  The subject of the address was to be of my choosing, but “something appropriate”!

I can’t recall the title, but the theme of my address was (a) that business letters, while necessarily accurate, should not be boring, (b) that business letters should be focussed, and free of waffle, and (c) that business letters should launch straight into their point – with an arresting first sentence.  I rather stressed this latter requirement by asserting that the writer of a business letter should strive to capture the reader’s attention in the same way that a good novelist does………...and then I proceeded to enthral my audience with a dozen or so first lines from the novels of Compton Mackenzie, a writer whom I much admired, but who these days has drifted into obscurity.  He was already pretty obscure in the 1970s.

Mackenzie lived a hugely diverse and productive life, from 1883 to 1972.  He was a Scottish nationalist - although being educated in the English public schools system and at Oxford, he was also as English as the English.  In his time he was an historian, he was involved in British espionage during the First World War, he wrote fiction including nearly 20 books for children, he wrote numerous books of history and biography, and he was a broadcaster.  His passion was music, and not only did he write critiques of gramophone recordings, but he wrote a number of books on music subjects.  In all, Mackenzie published around 100 books; I have 84 of them.  But Mackenzie was most famous as the founder of The Gramophone magazine, the self-styled home of “the world’s best classical music reviews”, and which is published monthly to this day.  The masthead of The Gramophone proclaims that it was “founded in 1923 by Sir Compton Mackenzie…………as ‘an organ of candid opinion for the numerous possessors of gramophones’.”  It was through The Gramophone that I became aware of Mackenzie, and somewhat obsessed by him.

I have no recollection of the reaction of the sated and tired office recruits to my un-accountant-like talk, but I doubt they were impressed.  One person’s passion is another person’s ennui; and, what’s more, I fancy that if a writing style hasn’t been nurtured by age 20 then it’s hardly likely to be triggered by thirty minutes of after-dinner preaching.

And how relevant, I hear you ask, is all this to breakfast in Smith Street, Collingwood? 

The relevance is that I was mulling over how to commence this piece, and looking for something attention-grabbing, when I realized that I had two equally useful ways to begin.  First there was the fact that there’s a McDonald’s outlet on one corner; and I was going to say something like:  “Well, it was inevitable that it would happen one day, and that we would be forced to contemplate breakfast at McDonald’s.”  Alternatively, I was going to say something like:  “I can categorically state that I have never seen such a diverse and interesting group of businesses in a strip as short as the strip of Smith Street between Victoria Parade and Gertrude Street. “

Then having toyed with these opening alternatives I discarded both in favour of the anecdote about trying to impart the importance of a good beginning…………..and I wonder whether, by now, anybody is still reading this blog.

Smith Street is a long unbroken shopping strip.  A hundred years ago it was fashionable, and the place to be and be seen.  It sold everything.  But it declined, the emporia closed, and what had been an "honest working-class suburb” became a suburb of “slums”.  The hard times in Smith Street persisted for a generation, perhaps two; but it’s now reviving.  We had traversed Smith Street previously, but never the short section running south from Gertrude Street to the T-junction at Victoria Parade.  Here we found the eccentric array of businesses; including, surprisingly, a couple of breakfast choices.   Against gut logic we passed by the place that was very busy, and chose the almost-empty one.  Our choice couldn’t have been more fortuitous.

Although unable to spot any name on the frontage, we were assured that the name is Starts Café.  It is at number 24 Smith Street.  There was one other diner only during our sojourn, and a few people who came in for takeaway coffee; business was distressingly bad.  And presumably this was the normal situation, because the young man worked alone, both front-of-house and in the kitchen.  His coffee was superb, and hot.  His big breakfast was as good as any we’ve had – copious bacon; perfectly scrambled eggs; excellent small sausages (not chipolatas); all served on toasted bread that was grainy, but not tooth-breakingly dense, and lathered with butter; plus - the chef’s suggestion – a serve of fried onions.  Seventh heaven is the final state of eternal bliss – well, we’d stumbled upon eighth heaven.  Okay, I exaggerate, but it’s not often I find myself salivating as I recall a recent meal.  Okay, another porky – I frequently salivate at the remembrance of food past.

Now to the non-breakfast elements of today’s stretch of Smith Street.  In the popular music trade they recognize a genre known as the “list song”, a song whose lyrics are little more than a list of items or situations or ideas – for example Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love, My Favourite Things from The Sound of Music, a hit of 1949 “A” - You’re Adorable, and the home-grown I’ve Been Everywhere.  There are dozens of list songs.  My brief run-down of the various Smith Street premises will have the flavour of a list song, albeit one not yet set to music.

#   A shop selling necklaces of both contemporary design and contemporary materials.

#   A garage window, with a Bentley pointing into the street and a Rolls tucked in behind.

#   The Lost & Found Market, sellers of second-hand furniture – quite large premises – with a sign on the window advising relocation around the corner……..that was due to happen a week prior, but hadn’t yet.

#   Australian Galleries, one of Melbourne’s leading private galleries, and the exhibitor of choice for many prominent artists.

#   The 65 Smith Street Gallery, currently holding an exhibition for the International Association of Hand Papermakers and Paper Artists.

#   A shop selling a wide range of fascinating items principally made from recycled materials.

#   Interior decoration specialists, with their total range of hard and soft furnishings bedecked in silver and black – no problem with the merchandise, but surely a problem finding customers.

#   Several women’s clothing shops – but without closer inspection I couldn’t decide whether to elevate them from "clothing" to "frock" or even to "garment".

#   A Thai massage establishment.

#   A tattooist in upmarket premises, specializing in “body art”.

#   A hat-maker, whose shop window was filled with decorated men’s top hats – fancy stitching on one, one with snakes sprouting from the crown, one with a clutch of tiny fingerboards mounted on the top, and one covered in hundreds-and-thousands.  Zany.

#   “St. Luke Artist Colourmen”, purveyors of hand-selected artists’ materials, with a window display of a paint which when applied to any metallic surface produces a rusted effect (or a verdigris effect).

Now is that list eccentric or not?

After breakfast we adjourned to the RACV Motorclassica at the nearby The Royal Exhibition Building.  There were a couple of hundred classic cars inside, and scores more in the grounds.  There was an emphasis on fast cars with, for instance, a palpitation of E-type Jaguars – note new collective noun.  For my taste there weren’t enough American limos of the 1930s – not a Packard to be seen – but who could complain?  All the men at the show had smiling faces and slightly dreamy eyes.  In another context I would have expected them to be wearing raincoats.

Gary Andrews

  p.s.  For the curious, here is a selection of Compton Mackenzie first lines.  Thirty-five years after my address to the recruits I find that Mackenzie’s style was somewhat generous, and although his first lines admirably set the scene, they are typically verbose.  What follows are four of the shorter ones:

*   By the time that Sylvia reached Paris she no longer blamed anybody for what had happened.

*   It may have been that the porter at York railway station was irritated by Sunday duty, or it may have been that the outward signs of wealth in his client were not conspicuous; whatever the cause, he spoke rudely to her.

*   Frightened by some alarm of sleep that was forgotten in the moment of waking, a little boy threw back the bedclothes and with quick heart and breath sat listening to the torrents of darkness that went rolling by.

*   The Highlands are not rich in domestic architecture.

And, speaking of first lines, nothing will ever beat L.P. Hartley’s opening to The Go-Between:  “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”