SATURDAY BREAKFAST #23: SPENCER STREET, MELBOURNE (BETWEEN FLINDERS and LONSDALE STREETS))

Visited 28 July, 2012

There are a couple of words that Australians use rarely, but which are solidly American.   The words are “carpetbagger” and “huckster”.  

Carpetbagger is a wholly American word, originating from the United States in the late 1860s, the years immediately following the Civil War.  The American South was in ruins, and was invaded by profiteers from the North seeking to make their fortunes during the period of reconstruction.   These opportunists travelled light, typically carrying their effects in small suitcases made of carpet – hence carpetbaggers, a less than complimentary term.  Carpetbaggers, while expressing solicitude, seek to make money from the misfortunes of others.

As to huckster: the Americans have taken the word over from old English, and adapted it for their own purposes.  Originally nothing more than a peddler, huckster today in its simplest form is someone who works in advertising.  But at its most pejorative, it is one who uses aggressive and questionable methods of selling.  The 1947 movie, The Hucksters, had Clark Gable [integrity, white hat] battling the powers of advertising [unscrupulous, black hats].  Hucksterism was on show. Not attractive.

These two words came to mind as we breakfasted at the Vibe Savoy Hotel on the corner of Spencer and Little Collins Streets.  I have been to the Savoy a number of times, often as a guest of the Government of Nauru, and most memorably in 1987 on the occasion of the grand re-opening after a reported $46 million refurbishment.  The hotel was then owned by Nauruan interests.

Poor, sad, Nauru is a victim of colonial and commercial imperialism; but it is also the victim of mismanagement by its leaders – it once had the lot, and now has nothing.

Nauru is such a tiny place, 21 square kilometres only; and with fewer than 10000 people has the second smallest population of any state (after the Vatican).  The island was settled by Micronesian and Polynesian peoples more than 3000 years ago, and its remoteness from other Pacific islands has led to a distinctive Nauruan people and language.  First contacts with European seafarers date from the late 1700s.  Nauru was annexed by Germany in 1888, the same year that the Christian missionaries arrived.  The island was “captured” by Australian troops in 1914, and after the end of the Great War, it became a territory mandated by the League of Nations to the joint administration of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom; and later there was a similar United Nations trusteeship.  Nauru gained its independence on 31 January, 1968.

Phosphate was discovered on Nauru in 1900, and the huge deposits have since been the mainstay of the Nauruan economy, although the extraction of those deposits has seen the fracturing of traditional life.  Much of the centre of the island, once a hillock with its highest point 71 metres, is now a “lunar landscape” – jagged coral pinnacles from between which the phosphate has been removed; once vegetation-covered tribal land, now uninhabitable, with the entire populace relocated to the coastal fringe.

The wealth from the phosphate accrued first to German interests, then to the British Phosphate Commission, and then – from 1968 – to the Nauru Phosphate Commission and the people of Nauru.

Where do the carpetbaggers and the hucksters come in?  Well, at one time in the 1980s there was a Nauru national investment fund reportedly valued at $1.3 billion; today that fund may be as little as $100 million, all lost through unwise investment.  Acquisition of property in Melbourne (and Sydney) proved to be a particular disaster.  Take the Southern Cross Hotel, the site of the Carlton brewery, the site on the corner of Spencer and Bourke Streets, then take insufficient resources to turn them into successful property developments, and you have inevitable sale off at a loss.  And then you have the eventual sale of the successful property investments (Downtowner Motel in Carlton, Nauru House, and the Savoy) to cover debt.  It was the seductive tales of the real estate carpetbaggers and hucksters, coupled with the naivety and hubris of Nauruan leaders, that produced this mess.  The Nauruan people are the sufferers.  One Melbourne property consultant was reported to have said that he was probably the only estate agent in the World who had sent a country broke!

Anyway, this woeful story was in my thoughts over breakfast at the Vibe Savoy.  The breakfast, by the way, was average to poor.  It was the usual hotel buffet, but very small-scale, and suffered simply from the lack of takers.  I don’t know the hotel’s occupancy rate, but would guess that there is currently a problem.  A shame, really, because the building is handsome, the rooms first rate, and the location fine.

The Savoy in Melbourne has a long history; there has been a hotel on the Spencer Street site since 1866 when Charles Alexander built and named Alexander’s Family Hotel.  Thus it remained until 1923, when renamed the Sunshine Hotel.  James Richardson, prominent hotelier, acquired the property in 1926, demolished and rebuilt, and revived the Hotel Alexander name.  The Federal Hotels group became the new owners in 1954, and the hotel was renamed the Savoy Plaza.  Then a curious twist: in 1974 the Victorian Government took over the building, and used it for some years as the training college for prospective members of the police force.  The Nauruans’ massive 1987 makeover restored it as a hotel, now named the Savoy Park Plaza. Finally, the new ownership from 2004, and the present name Vibe Savoy.

The hotel building was strongly influenced by the American architectural fashions of 1926.  Although there were art deco touches in the guest rooms it was said to have been built in the style of a 16^th century Italian townhouse.  Originally entered from Spencer Street up a wide staircase to the first floor, the Nauruan remodelling inserted a ground floor entrance foyer and facilities off Little Collins Street.  The architectural styles and touches all came together successfully, and the Savoy remains one of the most elegant buildings in the city.

If “change” equals “vibrancy” then the three-block stretch of Spencer Street between Lonsdale and Flinders Streets must be the most vibrant in the Melbourne CBD. The eastern side has a bunch of new hotels (contributing, no doubt, to falling occupancy at the Vibe Savoy); the former GPO has been converted to apartments, with a spacious restaurant in the ground floor; there are a couple of high-rise residentials; and the former headquarters of The Age is a major project under construction. 

The old Sir Charles Hotham Hotel, on the corner of Flinders Street is, sadly, no longer vibrant.  Although not so long ago a backpackers’ hostel, today it is unoccupied, and its owners are clearly aiming to demolish it by neglect………several upstairs windows are open, and exposing the interior to the elements.  In time there will be an order to demolish and that will be that.  The 1912 building, in the Queen Anne style, has clearly “seen better days”, but it doesn’t deserve such an undignified fate.  Indeed, although it has never received the official recognition of a National Trust or a Heritage listing, it is an important building in the history of Melbourne architecture.  It was designed by William Pitt, one of Melbourne’s great architects, architect of The Rialto, the Olderfleet building, St. Kilda Town Hall, the Bryant & May factory in Richmond, the Princess’ Theatre, and many others.  A number of Pitt buildings have been destroyed, including the Federal Coffee Palace, later the Federal Hotel (on the corner of Collins and King Streets) and it would be a shame to lose another.

I shall now confess to a memory lapse.  Back in the 1960s I used to attend to the income tax affairs of the Sir Charles Hotham’s owner.  Fifty years on I cannot recall his name!  It will doubtless come to me after this blog is posted.  He was a large shambling man, already in his 80s, and he lived a reclusive life alone in a remote corner of the hotel.  This is no doubt an exaggeration, but I recall his principal passion as the search for authentication of an “old master” he possessed.  I don’t remember whether he’d inherited the painting, or whether he had bought it years before, but he’d become obsessed with the thought that it was old, and that it was valuable.  He had had no luck in his search for validation and vindication, and was happy to share his dilemma with me.  The painting certainly looked old, and grimy; but the people at the National Gallery had apparently passed up the opportunity to claim discovery of an unknown masterpiece.  

Mr. X said his painting was named The Cenci.  I find now that The Cenci is the name of a play by Percy Shelley, based on the doings of a Roman family circa 1599.  The play was never performed in Shelley’s lifetime, because incest and parricide were not at the time considered nice.  But Mr X’s painting and Shelley’s play might have been set in the same era.  Who knows?  And who knows what happened to the painting after M. X’s death.  I certainly don’t.  I do know that the descent of the Sir Charles Hotham into oblivion has been inexorable.  It went from licenced hotel to private hotel to backpackers.  It flirted with cheap entertainment, including sandwich lunches accompanied by female strippers, the performers slipping back into their bank employee uniforms before returning to their desks.  There weren’t many opportunities for resurrection after that.  As our walk past highlighted, the Sir Charles Hotham needs a saviour with lots of money, and needs it quickly. 

The western side of Spencer Street has changed even more so than the eastern; but one of the most significant changes shows the least evidence of it.   I’m referring to the former Victorian Railways administration building on the south-west corner of Spencer and Flinders Streets.  To describe this building as monumental is no exaggeration.  It was built in the late 1880s, and under Railways ownership had a couple of major later additions - additions of extra floors, but totally sympathetic to the basic form and appearance of the building.  But as of 1985 the Railways personnel had been re-located, and the Government had earmarked the building for sale as a surplus public building.  Sale was effected, but the building languished in private hands, until it was reopened in 1998 as The Grand Hotel (117 apartment suites) and three floors of privately-owned Grand Central Apartments.  A splendid outcome.

A couple of blocks further north, adjacent to the old Spencer Street railway station (specifically alongside the platform where the interstate trains arrived) there used to be an extensive ground-level car park.  Now, since the latest re-modelling of the station and its emergence as Southern Cross, the parking space has been relegated to a multi-storey privately run operation quite a distance from the station.  In between the station and the car park there is the bus depot, with lots of food and other shopping on the street frontage.  All this is pedestrian and boring, and the contrast with the beautiful Savoy building and the sturdy former GPO building across the street is stark.

Then there is the Southern Cross station building itself.  Winner of awards for its design, it gets no award from me.  The undulating roofline is little more than a gimmick; and, as the storms of 18-months ago proved, it wasn’t even soundly engineered.  The station building is not there for the benefit of the trains; it’s there to make the whole experience of departure and arrival as efficient and as trouble-free as possible.  The edifice may indeed be all this, but there’s something else: it should be an amenable environment.  In this regard, in my view, Southern Cross is a failure – for one thing alone:  it doesn’t protect the public from the Melbourne winds. 

Obviously it’s not possible to protect the platforms from the wind and the cold, but by purposely leaving the building open at the Spencer Street side the architects have intentionally created a massive wind tunnel.  I can see the stylistic charm of the high roofline over the streetscape and the open space below – a very grand aperture – but in inclement weather there is no protection whatever: either the elements lashing in from Spencer Street, or the bleak wind rushing through from the platforms and out to Spencer Street.  Very innovative, and very stupid.  

One final and more positive note, although it’s a good news bad news story.   The previous station building, when Spencer Street, housed a large mural, painted by Harold Freedman (with a couple of assistants) and installed in 1978.   It was titled History of Transport, and was more than 36 metres long and 7 metres high.  I always regarded it as pretty awful, with its depictions of multiple modes of transport, not just railways.  Akin to the public art of (say) Diego Rivera in Mexico, there was plenty of colour and movement, and little subtlety.  Nevertheless, such works should never be intentionally destroyed in the name of progress.  There was no place for the History of Transport mural in the new Southern Cross complex, but it was preserved, first in storage for three years, then re-erected on the wall of the nearby Direct Factory Outlet premises.  An ignominious resting place perhaps, but a victory for the right thing, which even public authorities can sometimes do.

Gary Andrews