SATURDAY BREAKFAST #13: HIGH STREET, PRESTON

Visited 24 December, 2011

We had breakfast at the former fire station in High Street, Preston, now known as The Old Fire Station Café Gallery.  While there’s been a complete change in occupancy and use, the premises haven’t been totally made over.  The café occupies three ground-floor spaces, two inside - the principal one being the room that used to house the fire engines - and one a sizeable yard with plenty of cover provided by umbrellas.  There’s a detached two storey building beyond the yard, formerly living quarters for brigade personnel, I imagine, not associated with the Café; and who knows the status of the rooms above the Café – there’s no access, not even a shiny firemen’s pole to shinny up.

The décor is retro - a grab-bag of unmatched chairs, with laminex-topped kitchen tables of the 1950s and earlier.  Pretty daggy really, and not all that kempt; and the general impression is cheap rather than chic.  The food was average, but the coffee was excellent (although, as is so often the case, the second cups weren’t so good).  The cutlery was cheap – which isn’t the opposite of expensive.  The owners could have picked up good quality 60-year old cutlery from any opp shop for a song; instead we had forks that felt as thought they would bend in our hands.  An uncomfortable situation for patrons; and somebody should be told.

If you’d asked me in advance to guess the time when Preston was settled I would have said the 1890s, maybe 1880s.  But two High Street buildings were dated in the 1860s, one showing 1861 on its upper facade.  The answer lies in the amazing transformative effect of the Victorian gold rush.  Melbourne’s white settlement commenced in 1836; and, within 15 years, gold had been discovered in central Victoria, and thousands of gold-seekers were travelling north from Melbourne, including via High Street.   We can be sure that the solid 1861 building was a replacement of an earlier and more modest edifice, the later one built from the profits of trading with the would-be miners.

High Street is a major northern outlet from central Melbourne.  It retains its given name through a series of suburban localities, first Westgarth, then Northcote and Thornbury to Preston and beyond.  The Preston strip has undergone significant change in recent years.  The many Viet premises attest to a change in local demographics.  The construction of a median strip, complete with the plantings of Manchurian pears, has made the street more intimate and friendly, and there are numerous new high-rise apartments on High Street itself and behind.   Clearly people are moving into the area – it’s an area in transition.    Still there are lots of empty shop premises, often derelict looking; yet, despite this, and despite  the Woolworths complex in the back streets between High Street and the railway line, I fancy that High Street will rise again and once more become a  robust retailing strip.   So some free commercial advice:  open an up-market coffee shop and eatery.  There were only two breakfast places in the 250 metres of strip we explored, neither of them classy.

At the extreme northern end of our traverse there was a huge bicycle shop, Ray’s Preston, more an emporium than a shop.  There were a number of window displays, including a real treasure – a 1903 “The Charleston” bike.  In terms of basic design it didn’t look much different from a standard bike today, just simpler.  It had wooden grips on the handlebar, a bar-type handbrake under the right-side of the handlebar, and it had no gears.  As an indication of its bold 1903 modernity it had a sprung seat.  My Google search for information on “Charleston bicycle” - to establish, for instance, whether The Charleston was Australian made - produced over 50000 hits, but the first several pages were mostly to do with a bicycle business in Charleston South Carolina, and I gave up. …….but not before I’d learnt that around April 2010 the Canberra Bicycle Museum sold off its collection of 700 bikes.  The oldest bike in the collection dated from 1817.  The Museum website has been abandoned, but it seems that the collection had to go because of renovations to the Canberra Tradies Club, the owners of the Museum.  One posting expresses the heartfelt wish that someone would acquire the entire collection, but another posting says that the bikes all went “to good homes” – with the exception of a core 28 cycles that have been retained, albeit in storage.  A sad little story.  Why didn’t one of our public museums step in to keep the collection intact?

High Street’s major building is the former Preston City Hall, built in 1929 to replace the original 1895 Town Hall.  This building is now the civic centre of the merged City of Darebin.  Reached from the side street, all spick and span with a new iron roof, is a separate building, the “town hall” – used, I imagine, for large official and other functions.  The main High Street building doesn’t have the Victorian-era grandeur of the older Melbourne-area Town Halls – indeed, it’s “eclectic blend of the Queen Anne and French Second Empire styles” elicits a “what the…..?” reaction.

Standing in front of the old City Hall is a far more interesting structure, the First World War memorial.  The structure is about four metres square, about five metres high, and has a flagpole on its roof.  There are four corner pillars, and four more side pillars a little towards the centre of each side.  The structure is made of red brick, with occasional courses of rough-hewn stone.

The east/west sides are open, although passage has been impeded by the later erection of a plain brick pillar, with a tablet commemorating the dead of all subsequent wars and skirmishes.   The north/south sides are enclosed, and the inner wall space of each side is faced with white marble inlaid with black lettering.  The south side is fully taken up with the names of those from Preston who served in World War I.  The north side lists those who served and also perished; and the balance of the tablet contains an assortment of information about the War.  From the evidence of war memorials seen elsewhere, it was commonplace to show (as the Preston memorial does) “Principal Battles”, “Historical Events and Dates”, “Historical Names and Places”, “AIF War Statistics”, and “Casualties” - but never before have I seen a listing of “The Contending Forces”.  As a consequence, however, I now know that the good guys, The Allied Powers, were Great Britain and Dominions, France and Dominions, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Japan, Serbia, Roumania, Russia for two Years, and United States of America.  The very listing is a lesson in history.  Note, in particular, that at the time the memorial was built it was appropriate – certainly in Preston Australia - to regard Australia, Canada etc. as mere British appendages under the description “Dominions”.  And note that although Russia’s withdrawal from the War after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution warranted special mention, the short war of the Americans, whose doughboys didn’t arrive in Europe until after the USA declared war in April 1917, is not similarly engraved. 

The really curious thing is why the enemy countries are also listed.  Under the heading Central European Powers are German Empire, Austro-Hungary, Turkish Empire, and Bulgaria.  Were they being accorded honourable opponent status, or are the names there merely for historical completeness?  In any case, with four groupings only, versus the long list of Allied Powers, how is it that hostilities continued for nearly 4 ½ years?  Geoffrey Blainey observes that previous wars were typically fought by armies detached from the general populace, there was a pivotal battle and a victorious army, and an armistice was signed.  But in WWI whole populations were involved, either in the military services or as producers of food and armaments to satisfy the huge scale of the military operation……………although, as Blainey points out without irony, the demand for armaments was so great that the progress of the War was frequently held up waiting for deliveries to the front of fresh supplies of bullets and shells.   Trench warfare was also a prolonging factor, as was the fact that the War was being fought on several fronts simultaneously.  And throughout the War there was the continuing game of pick-up-sides, as formerly neutral nations signed up, and their physical involvement had to be slotted in.  Then there was simple psychology - neither side wished to concede defeat.  The four months madness of the Somme in 1916 claimed nearly a million dead and wounded, and after such an investment of flesh and blood which side could surrender with honour?  Double your bets ladies and gentlemen.  But, in the end, the obvious reason why the War lasted so long is that the sides were evenly matched.   Eventually the armistice was negotiated on the back of mutual exhaustion.  Sure the German army was in retreat, but it was more a retreat in the face of the inability to win rather than a retreat based on defeat………………………………. and this mindset gave rise to the sentiment in Germany that Germany wasn’t defeated it was betrayed, a sentiment that Hitler exploited a decade later and which was fundamental to his rise to the Chancellorship.

On the whole, the High Street experience was a pleasant one, but we left on a note of incredulity.  Passing the local undertaker’s we noticed a window display of funerary jars.   These were not ashes containers of stone or metal, but were porcelain, and obviously not intended to be temporary receptacles or to be buried, but meant for the mantelpiece.  Nothing surprising about that, I guess, except that these porcelain jars were not merely product samples, they were inhabited.  The dates of each dear deceased were engraved on the side, plus a coloured depiction.  Moreover, these were not last week’s cremations - the death dates on the jars were some time ago; and the mind conjures up stories of abandonment and treachery.   Did the family get tired of the project, and decide never to collect father?  Perhaps the widow died before she could collect, and nobody else knew.  Maybe the thought of dad’s stern gaze from the mantel became too much to handle.  Or, possibly, due reflection revealed that there wasn’t enough money to pay the balance of the purchase price.   Imagine the undertaker being landed with unsaleable stock!  Turn adversity into triumph: put them on display!

One jar was for a dog.  Pet cremation, I have subsequently learnt, is a thriving industry.  Are pet cremation fees based on size?  Is it cheaper to cremate a little yapper than a big woofer?    Personally, I’d be happy to see a special discount price for the yappers – it might stimulate business.

Gary Andrews