SATURDAY BREAKFAST #21: PARK STREET, SOUTH MELBOURNE

Visited 17 March, 2012

Before we set off this morning I had time to scan the paper, and I was sorry to see the report of the death of a long ago client.  It was back in the 1960s, at my first employment, when I looked after the accounting and tax affairs of Mrs. Mavis Archibald and her family.  Now, I wouldn’t ordinarily talk about the affairs of a former client, and certainly not in a public forum, but this was so long ago, and my couple of anecdotes are not business confidences.

Mavis Archibald was a widow.  Her husband had been an executive of The Herald & Weekly Times, the then publisher of the morning The Sun News-Pictorial and the afternoon The Herald, both since merged into the morning Sun Herald – well hardly a merger:  as time has shown, simply an absorption of The Herald, and its loss without trace.  George Archibald died very young and, while Mavis wasn’t at all the merry widow, she sure knew how to spend.  There was family money.

It was not then, nor is it now, for the junior accountant on the file to be befriended by the client, but Mavis Archibald was exceptional; and my two anecdotes stem from the friendly relationship that developed. 

I was invited to attend her daughter, Judy’s, 21^st birthday party.  I knew Judy, and helped her with her taxes, but could hardly be described as a friend deserving of an invitation – but I received one!  [Judy had a passion for things Italian, and in anticipation of travelling to Italia went to the unusual length of learning the language beforehand.  Meanwhile, she worked in a shoe shop in Toorak Village, and spent all her earnings on new shoes, of which she had numerous pairs – and I mean numerous, think Imelda Marcos.  She was the complete fashionista, and her flamboyant attire well fitted her for the streets of Milano.  Almost inevitably, she married an Italian; and, according to the Mavis Archibald death notice, is today the grandmother of Chiara and Leonardo.]

My enduring memory of the 21^st party is not the party as such and where it was held (honestly, I forget), but of the after-party back at the house in Toorak.  The dinner-suited waiters were awaiting the (say) 100 intimates, with champagne at the ready.  No choice was offered, and none was needed - remember, this pre-dates seat belts, sensible drinking, and breathalysers.   And then, as if by magic, fillet steaks were served for all.  I am in no doubt that to produce steaks for 100 people is a tricky proposition – we are not talking barbecue here!   But it was carried off with aplomb.  Mavis Archibald, the consummate no-expense-spared hostess.

My second tale occurred some time later, after Mavis had downsized to cut back on costs.  In the process she sold her Linlithgow Road home, and moved to a two-storey terrace home in Berry Street, East Melbourne.  Substantial renovations were required nonetheless.  Mavis explained the move as an economy measure, and vaunted the virtues of cheap shopping in nearby Bridge Road, Richmond…………adding that there was a wonderful café where she could order in plates of lobster sandwiches for her bridge afternoons. 

Dear Mavis – dead this week at 96 and, I guarantee, genuinely mourned by family and friends.

Park Street is not the main shopping thoroughfare in South Melbourne – there is no contest with Clarendon Street – but it has some places of interest, and one breakfast venue, Chimney’s at number 276.  Chimney’s is both a café and a small bakery, and occupies a spacious double-shop area in the very impressive Federal Building.  The building encompasses several shop fronts, and is of imposing Victorian design.  The metal girders across the wooden ceiling of Chimney’s suggest that the upper floor of the Federal Building once housed heavy machinery, but I have been unable to track the story.

Chimney’s was notable for its sensibly limited breakfast menu – and for having Bircher muesli on that menu; but when the muesli arrived it was a disappointment.  There was poached pear on top, and some pear had been folded through the mixture – not really a successful strategy.  Moreover, the basic mixture was tasteless, and it was gluggy.  The overnight soaking in pear juice had included hazel nuts which, by the time of serving, had become soft and unpalatable.  But the coffee was excellent times two.  Through my mumbling to the barista, and his feigned reluctance to make “extra hot” lattes, there was a misunderstanding, and the first coffees were made from skinny milk; so we certainly had to have seconds made with full cream milk.  The experiment that I’ve often thought to conduct has now been conducted, and the result is in.  Full cream is superior.

A little along from the Federal Building is the even grander building, heritage listed and known as the Patross Knitting Mills Building.  Built in 1885, two storeys with a central tower, “one of the finest commercial buildings of the 1880s in inner suburban Melbourne and a distinctive example of Victorian Free Gothic architecture”, it survives as an example of Victorian-era confidence and opulence.  It was originally the drapery emporium of Harcourt & Parry, and the H & P insignia is embossed on the façade.  The building was later adapted for use by the knitting mills of Messrs. Patkin and Rosenfeld, hence the Patross name.  Today, the principal occupant is the Australian Tapestry Workshop, one of the few tapestry workshops in the world, active since 1976, and weavers of numerous tapestries that today adorn public spaces around Australia - including a huge tapestry to an Arthur Boyd design, commissioned by my friend Patricia Feilman for the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

We had parked in adjacent Bank Street, and came past the South Melbourne Town Hall on our way to Park Street.  What an imposing and beautiful structure!  No longer a municipal headquarters, the Town Hall houses some of the secondary administration of the City of Port Phillip; but the building is today principally the home of the Australian National Academy of Music.  Built in 1880 – initially as the Emerald Hill Town Hall for the then-named suburb - the building is one of Australia’s greatest examples of Second Empire style architecture.  [Okay, I didn’t know either.  The tortuous political history of France threw up Napoleon III, who reigned as emperor from 1852 to 1870, the period of the Second Empire.  The flamboyant architectural style that emerged from Baron Haussmann’s make-over of Paris is known as the Second Empire style, prominent from 1865 to 1880.  The principal Parisian example is the old Paris Opera.  The heyday of this architectural style coincided with Melbourne’s post-gold rush boom  years and, along with the South Melbourne Town Hall, resulted in the Melbourne GPO, the Princess Theatre, the Kew Asylum Willsmere, and the Royal Exhibition Building.]

The stretch of Bank Street occupied by the Town Hall widens out, and is known as Bank Place, effectively a forecourt to the Town Hall.  The roadway splits, and there is a centre garden island.  Prominent in the garden allotment is an ornate drinking fountain.  Dating from 1905, as a City of South Melbourne 50-year jubilee commemoration, it is also dedicated to the citizens who ”fought the battles of the Queen and Empire in South Africa”.  It is curious that, even though Queen Victoria died four years before the dedication (and the South African war itself - which we today refer to as the Boer War - ended three years before), reference is made to “the Queen” rather than to Queen Victoria.  In 1905 the new Queen was Alexandra, yet the plaque-maker saw no incongruity in an inscription referencing the former queen without her name.  The fact is that, except for the most recent four years, Victoria had been queen for the entire lives of most of the people, and it must have been hard to contemplate another.  The same is true today for anybody under the age of 60.

We didn’t explore Park Street beyond the commercial premises, but we could see in the near distance the 20-plus-storey Housing Commission building on the corner of Park and Ferrars Streets.  This structure is one of the more than 40 such towers (located on 20 sites in metropolitan Melbourne) erected by the Housing Commission in the 1960s.  The Housing Commission of Victoria, a State Government agency, was formed in 1937 and – not well remembered today – was driven by zealous Christian and other “reformers”  (and property developers) down the path of “slum demolition”.  Some available inner-suburban spaces were developed for low-cost housing:  John Wren ran his trotting course to the south of Bridge Road, Richmond from 1910 to 1931, but having relocated to Ascot, he relinquished his lease, and the Housing Commission developed an estate that opened in 1941; and Garden City in Port Melbourne, while thoughtfully developed by the State Bank for private ownership - from as early as the 1920s - eventually had Housing Commission accommodation tacked on..............the former known locally as “Nobs Hill”, and the latter known as “Little Baghdad”.  These were isolated cases, and most relocation of the poor was to areas further afield, and on the back of slum reclamation.  But the pace of removal was not fast enough for the reformers, and the 1960s saw major compulsory acquisition, the creation of high-rise estates, and the attendant mass relocation.  The concrete buildings survive, many would say as multi-storey slums in lieu of single storey ones.  Ironically, the “slum” houses that escaped demolition in the 1960s are today prized and valuable inner-city dwellings.

I suppose the Housing Commission should not be blamed too much for what occurred 50 years ago – it had a mandate,  it presumably operated in accordance with the best practice of the day, and the social sciences weren’t as well developed as they are today.  Furthermore, the driving force of the slum removal lobbyists was powerful indeed, and brings to mind those who applauded the cleansing benefits of the Great Fire of London.

It’s worth noting, as a footnote, that the Housing Commission wasn’t lacking in imagination in the design of its concrete towers.  Take a close look, and you will see that there is the S-shaped design, the I-shaped, the C-shaped, the Y-shaped, and the T-shaped.  The Park Street structure is C-shaped.   We are so used, today, to the existence of these concrete towers on the skyline that we no longer notice them.  However, reflect on the fact that in addition to the Park Street tower there are towers in Brunswick, Carlton (6), Collingwood (3), Fitzroy (4), Flemington (4), Footscray, Kensington (2), Northcote, North Melbourne (4), Prahran (4), Richmond (5), St. Kilda and Williamstown (2), plus more in outer suburbs.   Collectively, the Housing Commission towers represent a major exercise (? experiment) in social engineering.

Gary Andrews