melb 59

From a fabulous flickr set: Australia 1959-1960 that features great street scenes of Melbourne including:

Collins st

Swanston Street

ICI house

Royal Women's

 

donc

You know there's a disconnect happening at Doncaster.



Opulence and crisis rubbing shoulders in newspaper columns.
Butlers/stylists/valets for the meltdowntowners.

From a few k away, we saw the new Shoppingtown steadily rising on the horizon by about 11%, opening for trade just as consumer confidence fell by 11%.

We checked out Donc* a few weeks ago in the not-quite-ready or Playtime phase, with visible cable lines and scaffolding surrounding the food-courts and fishmongers, and ye olde valets directing vehicles around the car parks with thumbed aplomb.
I liked the old Donc, actually, with its long narrow walkways of 70s mall, where walking groups of 70 year olds would sometimes stroll, its many exits, its mid century scale, its aspect looking squarely at the suburbs.
I am uneasy in Chaddy sized centres, disoriented in their no-place interiors, and certainly disturbed by pretensions of opulence in shops.

More at Sterne

* I don't think this name enjoys wide currency.
 

east

the way eastlink shrinks your long-held sense of distance.

One minute you're driving along at Doncaster
you go through the tunnel and next thing you're at Cadbury Canterbury Road?

Not to mention what the roadscaping does to your until now reasonably stable mental map.
Who knew Ringwood would ever look this?





So anyway, suddenly being in Bayswater North, we thought we may as well go to Bunnings to source shower rails
Just before I entered the store I saw I was wearing Bunnings colours.
I don't normally dress like a Leprachaun, but there you go.
In that vast cold barn was I paranoid to think Security was tagging me, with my ploy to impersonate a shop assistant and snaffle screws under my crismon hoodie?
(At least I didn't get asked about stationery lines as I did once when I accidentally wore Royal blue into Officeworks.)
 

floats

Images from the Moomba Parades from 1962 - 1965


(prompted by Tim's Sars post)

rockets

R was for Rocket


I remember spending a couple of goggle.hours looking for an image similar to this once.
I was after the everyday rocket-ware that adorned Dickens or the playgrounds of chadstone past.
Part of a great Flickr set

know your

via Mefi and via the US (Northeast Film History), I was idly seeking some AU home movie sites, when I finally sampled some offerings at Australian Screen .

Once there though, it was hard to go past Know Your Melbourne c1945
 

exotic

From Australian American Cookbook 1958 p70

On behalf of
 

nostalgia hit

...announcing the Gala Opening...

Yes Moomba is the season for nostalgia.
And I was almost hit on the head with nostalgia last week when my bookcase collapsed.
I was reading Graham Kennedy's Melbourne at the time, which is full of photos like this and this.
Actually it was mainly poetry and penguins that collapsed around me.
And top of the pile was Things Fall Apart.

coffee with

 


sopranos
 

erroneous

Wiki: Songs erroneously thought to be about Melbourne

"Morningtown Ride" by The Seekers. The song was originally a lullaby written by Californian folk singer Malvina Reynolds in 1957. It is often attributed to Melbourne for depicting an old-fashioned train trip to the similarly-named beach-side town of Mornington (as The Seekers largely hailed from Melbourne).

rockin'
rollin'
ridin'


source:world of the seekers

yarra

Yarra Moments
Like all rivers, the Yarra is more than water. It flows with love and memories and rites of passage. Sample musings from those who know and love the Yarra

I was looking for photos of the Yarra. When I lived downstream, I'd walk around the high cliffs opposite the Breweries with m'dog every day, sometimes humming the Whirling Furphies' My Brown Yarra which was released when when Doug was about two. My black dog used to jump into the river collecting bacteria in his ears, sometimes retrieving frisbees sometimes running with the wolves bears. To have buried him within that well marked territory would have been quite fitting.
There is more on the song among the stories at Yarra Moments

Over 17 years the song that began as “a nasty little poem” has become Melbourne’s unofficial anthem. “Somehow it clicks with people’s memories and hearts. Expats have been in tears when hearing it overseas because, I think, it’s a song about home, rather than just about the Yarra

(you can hear it here)

And there is a great(dane) dog tale in Horace Sierak's wonderful My Half at Rudder

As time went on, Pete grew up alongside my brother and I. He would join us for swims in the river during the summer months when it was hot. He particularly enjoyed sharing in a canoe ride whenever anybody would take him.

bike whisperer

in a nostalgic mood and around about the Unusual Museums of the Internet, boynton remembered that as a child she would often endow her bicycle as a horse. She dreamt of owning a chestnut, agisting it on the pipe-line, (as people did) but instead rode a beloved hand-me-down malvern star. Sometimes as a horse.
She once wrote a poem containing the lines:
tethering our malvern stars
outside milk bars
This is one of the few vintage malvern star images - (from morwell 1945 via korea) - with the nice line for spins during leisure hours

more nostalgia here at the British Lawnmower Museum Gallery: Allow Nora our Tour Guide To show you round.

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Comments: bike whisperer

Methinks you may be feeling a tad http://nostalgic.net/ ? And I see that in the lawnmower gallery they have just the car for me: http://www.lawnmowerworld.co.uk/prod03.htm , finally, I meet my rapid transit.

Excellent finds, all 'round.
Posted by .es at August 21, 2003 03:16 PM

Oh what sport! I've only just checked out ONE link on ONE link so far at Nostalgia - but the pictures of saddles are wonderful. Many thanks.

And that car is a find! It's Mine!
I think I once thought that driving a car could be fun. I imagined vehicles like this.
Best driving experience I ever had was in the old Bumper cars at Luna Park - that is, the most confident I ever felt behind a wheel!

(ps - The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: Female!)
Posted by boynton at August 21, 2003 03:29 PM

My God- I did exactly the same thing with my Malvern Star too...
Posted by mcb at August 21, 2003 04:02 PM

They were good sound horses weren't they, mcb.
Posted by boynton at August 21, 2003 04:06 PM

I'm glad someone else has memories of bumper cars being fun. I went on a bumper car ride at the local show recently (with 10 year old daughter) and it was not the remembered experience! The cars bumped and jerked and crunched and crashed, but never actually seemed to drive - I'm sure they did when I was a kid .... am I right, or should I just book myself into a museum?
Posted by wen at August 21, 2003 06:19 PM

I don't know how the modern ones compare - all I remember is a very pleasant experience when I was about 8 or 9 driving at Luna Park with my oldest sister. They did drive, I'm sure.
Perhaps the scale suits kids better - or perhpas the style was better then?
I preferred them to the dodgems, because I didn't like the sparks! (I was a rather sensitive child)
Interesting ground, wen, and prompts me to do some research.
Posted by boynton at August 21, 2003 06:26 PM

Oh - I think I've confused bumper cars with dodgems - these ones definitely had sparks. Maybe they don't make bumper cars anymore.

Not sensitive, Boynton, sensible.
Posted by wen at August 21, 2003 06:35 PM

Well bumpers certainly spoiled me for driving anyway, wen. Where else can you slowly trundle around in vintage vehicles and bump others almost with affection and definitely with impunity?
Posted by boynton at August 21, 2003 06:50 PM

I did try affectionately bumping (more of a pat, really) a telegraph pole with a vintage volvo once....

The pole was quite unscathed.
Posted by wen at August 21, 2003 08:00 PM

Yes I bumped a window with an old Valiant on my L plates. My reversing has never been very friendly

(btw The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: Female!)

Sexist git ;)
Posted by boynton at August 21, 2003 11:31 PM

I think my namesake advocates the self starter. In this Nora's experience the mower never does - or only after she's achieved mower-rage induced apoplexy. Not a good look.
Posted by Nora at August 21, 2003 11:41 PM

strange church

boynton continued her walking tour of the neighbourhood last night with the rogue bluey obediently at side, again seeing examples of modernist, albeit modest, domestic architecture in this small uncool,well-preserved pocket. We headed down a wide empty vista with bare well-behaved trees and hints of spring and rounded the corner, and suddenly saw one of those bold churches that sprang up throughout the suburbs in the sixties. A bit like this - only rounder. There must have been some happy coincidence of post-war cash flow and boomer demographics and modernism, because all denominations seemed to swap the basic chapel for the new geometrical walled-glass auditorium in the international style. The old building was often retained as adjoining hall. There were a few around that took abstraction to higher degrees, and boynton wonders about the fate of these spacious, oddly-shaped places in the days when churches are having to rationalise their property and divest assets.

The Roots of Modernist Church Architecture
At first this rejection of tradition took the form of subtracting or abstracting traditional motifs in buildings. Later, inspired by non-objective painting and sculpture, Modernist architecture sought to end the distinctions between floor and ceiling, interior and exterior, window and wall, and sacred and profane, which architecture has historically gloried in.

Dysfunctional Architecture
Dysfunctional church architecture has its taproot, not in a poorly chosen architect, cantankerous committee, too little money, or anemic project management. Rather, dysfunctional church architecture often has its source in weak or unclarified answers to the questions that determine a church's destiny

The real find for boynton in all this was this excellent site Modern In Melbourne - Architecture 1930-35. The Modern Strands survey contains many local examples. To be explored.

local history

Dead Foxes hanging from Tree...Roadside sign ... Members of the Market Gardeners’ Picnic Committee...Aspendale Football Club players line up....The 1965 re-enactment of Grimes landing at Long Beach.

These are some of the images from the City of Kingston historical website
Boynton has been browsing the wonderful local history articles, like Recollections of childhood in Dingley
(From the Minute Book of the Ladies Social Club) Mrs Gartside moved at the May 16, 1939 meeting “letter be written to tell Mrs Elms, our younger set are not satisfied with music & will have to try & suit them or close down.” This motion was seconded by Mrs Souter..The Dingley Social Club continued for many, many years, meeting each week to play beetles and to raise money for the war effort

A report on a shooting at Highett:
On the afternoon of November 25, 1932, two men, Harry Quong and Arthur Herbert Moulynex were observed as acting suspiciously by Nora Thompson outside the house of Dorothy Dickman in Highett Road. She watched them force an entry, via a window, into the house. No doubt wondering what to do she told Patrick Snelling , the local dairyman, what she saw

and an article on the Shindig at the Mordialloc Lifesaving club
The beginning of the dance was modest, with recorded music being used, before moving to bands of live musicians...Bobby Cookson was the singer with the group called the Premiers, and he recalled the first night of live music when he sang Elvis Presley’s song, ‘Hard Headed Woman’ and the crowd going berserk even though the performance in his judgement wasn’t that good

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Comments: local history

Dead foxes were hung from trees to lure others to their death.(allegedly) The curious fox would come over to investigate and POP.
Posted by Nora at July 24, 2003 10:45 PM

There was always something sinister there - although I guess such a sight could be regarded as 'sound'.
Posted by boynton at July 24, 2003 11:53 PM

kraft

It was during one of these outings to the Dandenongs in late 1923 that Sheilah Walker chose the brand name Vegemite
From the Fred Walker page (founder of Kraft) at Kraft's virtual museum.
Boynton partly interacted with the decades, so far only the 50's and 60's pages. (The sixties city on the latter looked a bit American judging by the fire hydrant, but guess that's cartoonish license, if not the manufacture of generic australian history.)

sky high

boynton was rather dismayed recently when revisiting the Mt Dandenong Observatory. It may have been hazy, but all binoculars had been removed. There was no one on the gate. No one sat at the wind blown tables on the terraced pebbled plaza. A lone drumstick sign lured sight-seers into the strange empty milk-bar operating in fall-out mode under the once famous Sky High restaurant. Orange netting indicated major renovation work was apparently underway - but not today anyway.
Anyone growing up east of the CBD from the '70's on would probably have certain folkloric memories of this site, if not of the tennis-club dinner dances inside the restaurant, then perhaps of the youthful dance variations that transpired nocturnally within the car park. Apparently. Who knows - maybe the actual restaurant did have a touch of the Gobbler about it, but the architecture always looked rather bold and exotic and even sophisticated to this green young outer-suburbanite. It was a shock to see the great stoneworked edifice sitting idle and cold on top of the mountain.

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Comments: sky high

Those binoculars were a rip off! Didn't work half the time and all you could see was a horrible haze.
Posted by Nora at July 17, 2003 06:43 PM

Never tested the binoculars, but they always looked the part. But I seem to have struck a few "hazy" days up there, and always imagine that the other 362 odd days of the year are perfectly clear.
Posted by boynton at July 17, 2003 06:57 PM

They took them away because no one carrys around pennies anymore.
Posted by Tony.T at July 18, 2003 07:08 PM

can't speak for Penny, but I've only ever lacked cents in wanting to use binoculars.
Posted by boynton at July 19, 2003 12:50 PM

melways

boynton was in seventh heaven (melways map xx H7) last night when she suddenly stumbled upon this link to her favourite book- a first edition of the Melway Street directory (via virulent memes). This is said without irony- as much as all trace elements can ever be removed. Boynton is not much of a driver, but loves to read, scan, gaze for hours at the beautiful bird's eye view of streets and tram lines, post offices and public telephones. Parks. Bicycle tracks. Alternate routes for imaginary journeys. Short-cuts for alternate destinations, parallel paths.
She can possibly plan neurotically, retrace steps, check bus routes, estimate distances with a piece of string. There is another appeal of the early editions, especially this rare first edition. A sense of memory mapping. The map catches us in time. On this page for example, at this time, my grandparents were still living, this is the way we would get there. Extended families, neighbours, characters, old timers, lost communities. That brief illusion that they are still there, old lives, somewhere in the map. Perhaps such charts function as memory palaces.(via a comment here)
And the record of lost landmarks of the highway, the drive-in theatres that were privileged in 1966 with a symbol, a red triangle, as if a drive-in was a serious public amenity, an emergency centre. None survived apart from Coburg. And the strangeness of seeing the inner north uncut by freeway, that prehistory when the winding river was the only divider between suburbs. And the great white spaces at the edges of suburbs yet to sprawl into today's fringe. Emptiness coveted by speculators, still enjoyed by cows and orchards and dog boarding kennels (the latter often the signpost of the sonic frontier)
But it isn't merely nostalgia or archival value. Boynton can meditate over the current edition just as easily. She has about four in her collection - "about" because one was chewed by douglas and is only half readable. One was found dumped on a street with cover and pages missing. One is a deluxe hard cover large print. And one was a recent op shop find - a second edition. But this on line version will fill the need for virtual melways-gazing, a fish bowl, a fire place, a book of kells.

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Comments: melways

Our parents were determined we became organised little demons so they always gave us street directories for birthdays. And footies and cricket sets.
Posted by Pithy at July 3, 2003 03:32 PM

Ah but U B a UBD man yourself I imagine, Pithy?
A very wise present to give a child. I received my first on my 18th birthday to go with the car licence! That was the one douglas chewed.
Posted by boynton at July 3, 2003 03:40 PM

What a beautiful post, Boynton.

I, like you, am a map fancier (although, ironically, I'm not very good at reading them. Perhaps I spend too much time admiring the aesthetics of all those wiggling lines and not enough concentrating on what they actually mean...)
Posted by mcb at July 3, 2003 04:33 PM

Yes it's the aesthetics indeed mcb, but that is the only way to read a map in my book - isn't it!
Posted by boynton at July 3, 2003 04:41 PM

I'm also a map geek, but I much prefer the dead-tree versions..
Posted by Scott Wickstein at July 4, 2003 01:35 AM

Fascinating as the first edition Melway is (especially for checking out where all those long-gone Melbourne landmarks used to be), the Dallas Fort-Worth road map remains my favourite. I like the way it reflects the collective unconscious of the not so biggest state in the Union.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at July 5, 2003 03:50 PM

No link to that great unconscious chart, Gummo?
Also: do you know of any Melburnians, apart from advertising merchants' faux RP, who ever say "melway" without the colloquial,universal "S"?
Posted by boynton at July 5, 2003 08:37 PM

Sorry - that was a big omission, wasn't it. Anyway, here's a map of Dallas from Yahoo. The collective unconscious manifests itself around Dallas in the centre of the map, extending westward past Irving, Grande Praire and North Richland Hills. Or maybe it's just in my mind.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at July 5, 2003 08:52 PM

Oh damn. The link got stripped. It's at this big URL:

http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&ed=zTVPPup_0To0E6b69xaYI8LYz6RpsL2eHnM1hqKI25S_eZIfiXJeuaojSODS5_s1&csz=Dallas,+TX&country=us&cs=4&name=&desc=&poititle=&poi=&uz=75202&ds=n&BFKey=&BFCat=&BFClient=&mag=6&newmag=5
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at July 5, 2003 08:56 PM

or perhaps this?
This url is even bigger

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/gmd:@FILREQ(@field(SUBJ+@band(Richmond+and+Louisville+Railroad+))+@FIELD(COLLID+rrmap))

Possibly no greater meaning here than chance and chart-fancy. Just happened upon it at Coudal "for map freaks what could be nicer"
Posted by boynton at July 6, 2003 07:01 PM

Getting back to the Melway - I haven't found seventh heaven yet, but it's good to see that Nirvana is still where it always has been - Map 68 K3. And existential crises seem to have been going on for some time at Map 62 A9.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at July 7, 2003 05:54 PM

Ha!
You'd think that there'd be a roundabout somewhere near nirvana?
And interesting re exi-crisis. I happened to be driving once with some actors, one of whom had just played the Great Dane himself. We passed
73 E2
"You'll go MAD in this street!!!" my friend observed.

I'm sure this virtual car-rally game has legs, Gummo!
Posted by boynton at July 7, 2003 06:18 PM

"I'm sure this virtual car-rally game has legs ..."

I think we may be in 30 C2 on that.
Posted by Gummo Trotsky at July 7, 2003 07:21 PM

7 B6
Verily

(presuming you didn't mean (H Swain) reserve of course)
Posted by boynton at July 7, 2003 07:28 PM

and btw. seem to have located 7th heaven.
It's somewhere within 60 G5, but the view is hazy as you might expect. Runs off Outlook
(according to my latest edition this is the 7th listing of such)
Posted by boynton at July 8, 2003 12:29 PM

Some people get totally adicted to owning Melways - or street directories generally. I have 35 Melways (23 different editions and various double-ups) and over 200 other Australian street directories. This has been known to present problems - like where to put them and to whom you would actually admit owning them... but adictions are not easily kicked.
Posted by Phlip at September 10, 2003 04:43 PM

You inspire me Philip.
Not to kick mine at any rate.
35 is a benchmark - and I have not added to my collection for a while.
I have the same problem of storage with other books I collect (50's and 60's stuff - not to mention Girl's Annuals) - but would never think of shedding any melways - even the shredded ones.
I do have a few directories from other States - and other countries - and can even gaze at these for long stretches.
I wonder if you have edition number one?
And which is the best edition in your opinion (apart from the current one of course?)
Posted by boynton at September 10, 2003 06:15 PM


Hey Boynton, mmmm, unfortunately no edition 1. I reckon my grandma had one when it was new, and I was always hoping to inherit it, then she went and died while I was interstate and no-one remembered me. Bet it was thrown out. I have only seen one "in the flesh", so it is kind of nice to have it on-line now. Favourite? Dunno - I liked edition 7 very much - 35% increase in maps (from 130 to 175) including the peninsula & "now with ladies bowling clubs" !!! What overseas directories do you have? I have one of London in the 50's and one of Singapore.
Posted by Phlip at September 11, 2003 08:45 AM

Must look out for that edition 7 now - top of the list.
I don't have anything too exotic. I have the London A-Z of course, and the large AA guide to the UK (which I love), a good hardback European road atlas - with lots of Euro city maps within, and a couple of the US directories - no individual city ones - alas.
London in the fifties would be fantastic.
As I tried to suggest above - they do somehow capture the era.
Posted by boynton at September 11, 2003 11:37 AM


Is the London A-Z a directory or a fold-out map? I have an A-Z fold out map. The directory is a Bacon's Atlas of London, actually 1968 when I look again - it is fabulous. The oldest Melbourne directories I have are Morgans - the cinema advertising poeple - from late 30's I think, no date to confirm.

Been having a bit of a look on your web site - its v interesting, well done!
Posted by Phlip at September 11, 2003 01:42 PM

Thank you kindly.
The London A-Z is the directory. Makes you realise just how good the Melways is - although perhaps like our relative currency - I'm dazzled by the Monopoly-colours and there is style in basic monochrome!
I have a Morgans too - but only from the 60's.
I like the Morgans-yellow, but otherwise the Melways beats 'em all hands down. (eyes up)
Posted by boynton at September 11, 2003 02:56 PM

Asthetics aside, if someone is offering straight swaps of dull-looking stirling for dazzling-looking aussies, its a good deal!
Posted by Phlip at September 12, 2003 02:19 PM

buenos melba

Buenos Aires in the Fifties (via Plep) is a great photographic glimpse of another city,another time.
Was there something reminiscent of Melbourne in the 50's or did we just imagine it - or light it that way, or colourise it, viewing the past through tinted, rose postcard views? That was a melbourne on the brink of demolition or preservation, the whelan the wrecker ball poised above its skyline, debating whether to blitz and build or conserve its strict 132 foot height limits.
A friend of boynton's once returned from Buenos Aires and said it reminded him of Melbourne in its Euro feel, that colonial disjunction. Perhap we're just too keen to keep that compass relative - everyplace as an an analogy to home. It's what boynton often does in cyber space, looks for the local links, the spatial bearings, twinnings, chains, kennings.
Melbourne out-bid Buenos Aires for the right to stage the 1956 Summer Olympics, and there is a Jane Austen Society in both cities.
A surreal link -the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once spent some time in Melbourne and according to Guy Rundle:
Borges found Melbourne to be evocative of Buenos Aires, albeit more staid. The wide Victorian streets and languorous gardens, the tang of rusting air from the wide verandas, the stately trams, the pompous stone buildings shaded by palms - the city had the sort of timelessness that he associated with all southern places. ``Citta metafisica'' he called them ``transcendental cities in which the eternal was open at every moment, where a set of locks in a window in `Glenhuntly' road is as beguiling and mysterious as the sublime shadow of the Shrine at night

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Comments: buenos melba

That quote is surreal! I guess it's good old Aussie cultural cringe (whatever that phrase actually means), but I never think of literature legends interacting with the places I know. I love Borges, and I love the way he looked at Melbourne. Thanks for the quote.
Posted by Beth at June 23, 2003 12:19 PM

I know, Beth, it is weird to think of Borges arriving in 1938 Melbourne. Maybe I cringe 'on behalf of' our poor old parochial city with its magnificent, "awe-inspiring" domed reading room.
I knew Ray Lawler and Helen Garner etc wrote there, hadn't heard about Borges.
I wonder if there is an Argentinian equivalent of the cultural cringe, the tyranny of distance etc?
Posted by boynton at June 23, 2003 01:59 PM