Sydney Bookshops Part 1: Sydney’s Phantom Book Shops Revisited
Posted: January 18, 2026 Filed under: Shops, Sydney City | Tags: Adyar Bookshop, Angus and Roberston, Ashwood's, Basement Books, Bookshops, Comic Kingdom, Gould's Book Arcade, Isadore Brodsky, state library of nsw, Sydney's Phantom Bookshops, The Bookshop Darlinghurst, The Cinestore, The Land Beyond Beyond Leave a commentSydney’s Phantom Book Shops by Isadore Brodsky was published in 1973, one of Brodsky’s many historical studies of the city. Brodsky was a doctor and a passionate historian, a prolific researcher of what was then called ‘Old Sydney’: its 19th and early 20th-century history. Sydney’s Phantom Book Shops followed the stories of the city’s bookshops and sellers, inspired by Brodsky’s passion for books and his dismay over the dwindling number of small, independent businesses in the rapidly modernising Sydney of the 1960s.
Whenever I come across it in secondhand book shops I pause, struck by the cartoonish ghostly lettering on its cover, designed to look like a torch was shining over the name in the dark. By ‘phantom’ Brodsky meant book shops that were no longer there, that had been lost as the city changed. The 19th-century buildings that had been occupied by small businesses were rapidly being demolished, closed or relocated. High rises were being built and the streetscape remodelled. Brodsky’s study ends in the early 1970s and of those he records, only Dymocks continues as a bookshop today.
As well as Sydney’s Phantom Book Shops, a number of guidebooks were published of Sydney bookshops around the same time. In the 1970s there were two editions of Inside Sydney’s Bookshops by Tom and Wendy Whitton (who themselves became booksellers, establishing Megalong Books in Leura), and in the 1980s, Bookshops of Sydney by Christine Flynn. Both provide excellent time-travel, capturing the atmospheres of the shops as well as descriptions of their specialties. In these guides I find bookshops that continue to this day (Abbey’s, Galaxy, Gleebooks, Modern Times), and others which lasted for long enough for any seasoned book shopper to remember them well.
I’ve been reading these as I’ve been researching Sydney city bookshops, from the 1980s to the present, as part of my State Library of NSW Summer Fellowship. Inspired by Brodsky I thought I would make my own list of phantoms, remembering some of the book shops that have gone from the city more recently. As with any such list it’s selective, but I’ve tried to capture some of the most significant and atmospheric of Sydney city bookshops from the 1980s onwards, and I look forward to hearing about the bookshops and bookshop experiences you remember.
- Angus and Robertson
For a century Angus and Robertson was a mainstay of Australian bookselling, and by the 1980s and 90s it already had a long and storied history. At that time there was a huge Angus and Robertson that took up the entire basement level of the Imperial Arcade, and there were also up to 170 suburban stores across the country. Now it exists only as an online store, and is best remembered as a formative part of Australian book selling and publishing history.
When visiting Angus and Robertson at the centre of Pitt St mall you would go down the steep stairs to find a long, cavernous shop that seemed to extend back as far as the eye could see. It was a good place to hide out during lunch hour if you worked in the city and this photo captures something of its atmosphere, with a large collection of mainly mass market books in a long, fluoro-lit basement.
As with many of the bookshops I’ve been researching, there are few photographs of them to be found online – not for the first time I wish I had walked around as a teenager taking photos of everywhere I went in the city. These photographs come from Old Shops/Old Sydney groups on Facebook, and there are also some photos of the window displays that caught people’s attention at street level here.
2. Adyar Bookshop
Opened by the Theosophical Society in the 1920s, Adyar had various locations around the city: Castlereagh St, Market St (in the State Theatre Building), Clarence St, then finally 99 Bathurst St (which you can still visit virtually thanks to the magic of 360-degree photography) which was its last location before it closed in 2012. This article attributed the reason for its closure to the mainstreaming of many of the mind-body-spirit ideas that were Adyar’s stock and trade, as well as the general pressures of early 21st century bookselling: online shopping and digital media. This ad from 1977 gives a sense of the kind of titles stocked by Adyar.
In her 1987 guide Christine Flynn describes the Market St shop this way: ‘carpeted and quiet, secluded from natural light, Adyar has the solemnity of a place of worship’. Other descriptions of Adyar make mention of the smell of incense that would envelop you upon entering the shop, which also forms a part of my memories of Adyar, when it was the place to seek out tarot cards, crystals, and books on the esoteric, metaphysical and paranormal. It was one of those shops where it felt like entering an entire world. Just being in Adyar gave you the sense that there could be other forces at work behind everyday life, and the shop might have the guide to finding them.
3. Ashwood’s
If Adyar had a peaceful, sweetly-scented, meditative atmosphere, Ashwood’s was its opposite. It was often crowded with record collectors searching for a bargain when I first came upon it in the 1990s. Then it was one of three secondhand book and record shops on a row on Pitt St (including Lawsons and The Pitt), facing onto the hole in the ground that had been Anthony Hordern’s enormous department store (now World Square). Flynn’s 1987 description held true to how I experienced it: “at any time on a Saturday morning, you can see maybe 20 to 30 people, nearly all males, elbow to elbow in Ashwood’s…. No new paintwork, nothing done to the floor, same old fixtures, still that familiar dusty and musty smell.”
Later it moved to a basement shop on York Street, behind the QVB, but retained the same atmosphere into its final years. By then it had been in business for a long time: established in the 1930s, it went through numerous owners before it closed for good in the 2010s.
It lives on in its distinctive labels, which turn up now and again in secondhand (well, by now third or fourth-hand) books and records.
4. The Cinestore
It took me quite some time to remember the name of this shop, which I knew as the “script shop”, after visiting it now and then in the 1990s. The Cinestore was at the very edge of Chinatown before it crosses into Darling Harbour, and it sold film scripts of uniform appearance: loose sheets bound together with metal clips. The scripts came direct from film shoots in what was, as the proprietor William Eiseman said in a 1996 interview, “a very grey market”. This made a visit to the Cinestore exciting: here you were only one step away from Hollywood, while also being in a room full of what looked like university course readers.
5. The Land Beyond Beyond
The Land Beyond Beyond was a comic shop on George St, which you entered by first walking down a long hallway, an experience described in comic form on the shop sign.
Run by Terry Brown, who was also known for his graveyard-shift radio show Stalking the Nightmare, The Land Beyond Beyond had its first premises in the Crystal Palace Arcade, before moving to Marba House on George St. In 1984 John Clare described its setting in an article in The Good Weekend: “Beyond Beyond is not hard to reach. It is in the Chinatown stretch of George Street, downhill from the movie houses, near Hobbyco Toys and The Shooters Home, turn in beside a Chinese cake shop, go along a dimly lit corridor… and you will find a room full of comics and movie memorabilia.” A glimpse of the interior of the shop can be seen in this photo shoot of the Hoodoo Gurus from Smash Hits, and this artist’s impression (thank you Simon).
The dimly lit interior with black-painted walls, the strange music or sound collages playing, and racks of VHS tapes signalled its countercultural focus. The Land Beyond Beyond closed in 2000 – “this type of retail is really like a dinosaur now…. I don’t even have a computer,” Terry Brown said in an article reporting on its closure. The article describes the atmosphere: “nerdy, offbeat looking men flick through the racks of comic books as the constant banging of construction mars the quiet of the land beyond beyond, the oldest comic-book store in the city of Sydney.”
Aligned to The Land Beyond Beyond, at least category-wise, was the nearby Comic Kingdom on Liverpool St, which closed in 2015 (photographed below in these final days). Entering Comic Kingdom was to enter an archive: it stocked comics accumulated from throughout its entire 40 year history.
6. Basement Books
From 2004-2020, along the Devonshire Street tunnel, out from Central station, was Basement Books, a low-ceilinged underground bookshop that looked to have been decorated with tinfoil and highlighters.
Basement Books sold a huge variety of discount and remainder books, as well as craft supplies, and you could never be quite sure what you might find in there. If you’d missed your train and had a while to wait, there was no better way to spend it than looking through the big heavy art books or the rejected novels with their telltale black marker stripe across the edge of the pages.
There have been various discount and remainder bookshops in Sydney over the decades I’ve been investigating, some of them established like Basement Books, others more short-lived. Some of the remainder bookshops Christine Flynn writes about in her 1987 guide have only left their traces as bookmarks.
7. Third World/Gould’s Book Arcade
The best known Gould’s Book Arcade was the one at the start of King Street, Newtown, which operated from 1989 to 2018. By the time Bob Gould moved his bookshop to King St, he’d already had a number of other bookshops, first the Third World Bookshop which opened in 1967 (from the Whittons’ 1976 guide “a shop which assaults the senses at various levels – if it doesn’t grab your mind, you’ll probably trip over something on the floor”) and The Pitt (next to, and similar to, Ashwood’s on Pitt St).
By 1980 Gould’s Book Arcade had been operating on George St for around three years. When Anne Stone from Sydney City Monthly visited, she described the “bright yellow three-storeyed facade” of the building and how, inside “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many books in one place at one time”. A photograph accompanying the article shows a scene not dissimilar to that of the big Newtown Gould’s.
The accompanying article describes going behind the scenes to the Gould’s living quarters: books everywhere, precipitous wooden staircases, a sleek black cat on duty keeping rats at bay, and a tiny rooftop garden: “on sunny days, Janet and Bob sit out there, the cat basking on the warm concrete, the walls and roofs of city buildings rising protectively around them”.
Gould’s Book Arcade was in this location until the building was demolished in the mid-80s, and the shop moved first to Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt (Flynn in 1987: “In one word – gigantic. In two words – sheer lunacy. In three words – most eccentric bookshop”) and then on to its legendary King St location. Nowadays, while the days of the Book Arcade are over, Gould’s continues in smaller premises on the south end of King St.
8. The Bookshop
Sydney’s longstanding queer bookshop, The Bookshop on Oxford St, sadly closed at the end of last year: a great loss for the queer and bookselling communities. The shop had been in its Oxford Street location since 1984, and has been a community hub ever since: reports covering its closure contain moving stories of the care and support the bookshop has provided for the queer community.
This history of the shop charts it from its beginnings in 1982 and follows its significance since that time. The shop’s closure was due to finances: over recent years developer’s delays made the bookshop’s planned move into the Oxford and Foley development financially unsustainable.
Bookshops, like other small businesses, are vulnerable to the movements of real estate, and there’s a shadow history of Sydney bookshops moving, closing, and changing in response to property pressures. In Sydney’s Phantom Bookshops, Isadore Brodsky writes passionately of the importance of small bookshops for the city, and their vulnerability to “the passage of the commercial juggernaut, crashing its way, ruthlessly, almost blindly, in a singularly devastating destructiveness”. He is referring to the midcentury demolition of the 19th-century arcades which readily housed such shops, but the same pressures exist today, seen in redevelopments that promote lifestyle but are ultimately concerned with profit.
9. Intervention and New Era Books and Records
The last four decades have seen various left-wing and anarchist bookshops come and go in the city: now only Jura Books remains on Parramatta Road in Petersham.
In the 1980s there were a number of left-wing bookshops in the central city, including Intervention Book Shop at the start of Dixon St and New Era Book Shop on Pitt Street, described in Joan Lawrence and Richard Blair’s excellent history of Sydney Bookshops as carrying “Russian souvenirs as well as strawberry jam and mineral water, among socialist newspapers and periodicals”.
10. Grahame’s Book Company
Grahame’s Bookshop was before my time but it lives on in its bookmarks, which I often encounter in collections of bookmarks in secondhand bookshops: they must have given one out with every book and been appealing enough in design – picturing the ibis-headed Egyptian god Thoth – for people to keep.
By the 1980s there were a number of Grahame’s shops in the city and suburbs: the new branch in the Mid-City Centre carried these bestsellers in 1981:
At this time the central Grahame’s was on the corner of Hunter and Pitt Streets, where in 1987, Christine Flynn found the shop to be “one of our city’s better bookshops” with “thoughtful window displays”. But now, when I look up the address, the shop on the corner where Grahame’s once was stands vacant, its big windows covered in signs for an EZ Mart, opening there soon.
Skybridges
Posted: August 15, 2025 Filed under: Shops, Sydney City | Tags: piccadilly centre, skybridges, sydney city 7 CommentsGetting to know a city means getting to know its shortcuts. The back lane that cuts a corner, the arcade that connects one street with another, the pathways that extend below and above ground, avoiding the traffic at street level.
How far can you get across the Sydney CBD without using the street? It’s all the more of a challenge because there is no overall order, no masterplan. Plans arise, such as the Wynyard Walk plan from the early 1970s, and most recently, the planned underground pedestrian network around the new Hunter Street Station. Even so, the thoroughfares make up a piecemeal network. All were built at different times, and if you come to the city regularly you will likely have developed your own routes among them.
Some of these routes almost everyone knows, others are more obscure. Some of the most well-used pedestrian thoroughfares are the underground walkways that extend out from Town Hall station, connecting up with the Queen Victoria Building and The Galeries. At peak hours it can be a struggle to move against the tide of people going to or from the station, an experience reflected in the terrazzo mural of goldfish at the entrance to the QVB, which I always make sure to look down at when I walk over it.
As much as it’s a good idea to look up to notice the unexpected, it can also pay to look down. In this case, it’s to see the swirl of orange fish with glass eyes, circling and dispersing like the crowds of people that surge past daily. ‘School of Fish’ is an artwork from 2000 by Rodney Monk and Giselle Humphries – Rodney Monk is one of the muralists who began work in the 1970/80s, known for murals such as the Peace Mural on Pilgrim House on Pitt St, the mural of trees on Marrickville High School, and the mural at The Crescent, Annandale.
One of my favourite city shortcuts is through the Piccadilly Shopping Centre, through which you can travel between Pitt and Castlereagh streets. It cuts out having to negotiate the busy corner with Market Street at the edge of Pitt Street mall and plunges you into a shopping-mall atmosphere of gleaming tiles and glass. Near the Pitt Street entrance is what might be the shortest escalator in the city to convey you up to the Castlereagh Street level.
There are two exits on the Castlereagh side, north and south, and I always choose the north one which passes by a men’s outfitter with a window display of John Lennon brand shirts. Across from it Clueless International, a women’s clothing store which I imagine could only have been named in the 1990s, its name only becoming more perplexing as the years go by.
The current fitout of the centre, with its marble floor tiles and glass facade, dates from the 1990s, although it was built in the 1970s to replace the Piccadilly Arcade (which had been known, among other things, as the arcade which housed Weirdo’s Magic Shop).
Another 1990s feature of the Piccadilly Arcade are the skybridges, two walkways that extend out above street level, across Pitt and Castlereagh Streets. Both, now, are inaccessible, but used to connect the arcade with the City Centre monorail station on the Pitt Street side, and the Sheraton Hotel on the other. The one on the Castlereagh side like a train carriage, enclosed on top and bottom with a line of windows along each side. The skybridge on the Pitt St side has a glasshouse look to it, with wraparound windows, extending across the street on an angle between the two shopping centres.
As much as I investigated the corridors of the shopping centre trying to find one, there is no longer a public way to access the skybridges. If you haven’t used them by now, you may have lost your chance: both have been planned to be demolished in a redevelopment of the Piccadilly Centre. “Skybridges are no longer regarded as a positive urban outcome in the City’s planning vision and controls,” a City of Sydney report on the site from 2021 stated. But the redevelopment has now been downgraded to a refurbishment, so perhaps they will remain.
On the next block down from the Piccadilly Centre are two further skybridges, connecting Myer, Westfield, and David Jones across Pitt Street Mall and Castlereagh Street. These were first built in the 1970s as part of the Centrepoint shopping centre, and then rebuilt in the redevelopment of the centre around 2010. One of my persistent childhood city memories is going with my mother to a cafe in the skybridge that connected Centrepoint to David Jones, and looking out the windows down to the street below. It was around the time of the photo below and I like to imagine we were up there at this very moment, and I was having a glass of apricot nectar and feeling cosmopolitan.
Now these Westfield skybridges are made of glass, giving you the feeling of floating above the street, away from its noise and rush. They give a perfect view, too, back at the two Piccadilly Centre skybridges, spanning the street, unused and in limbo.
Inside the Newsagency
Posted: August 3, 2024 Filed under: Shops 10 Comments
All over the suburbs, newsagencies are changing. Many are closing down. In Croydon, at the end of the row of shops, another newsagency that I used to visit has gone out of business. First its doors were shut tight, papered over so there was no view of the empty interior. The facade still carried the signs for the newspapers and lotteries, and faded posters of magazine covers and social distancing advice sagged inside plastic frames. Then a hoarding was constructed around it, with only the end of the sign poking out to show what the shop had once been.
Newsagencies are moving into the realm of video stores and milk bars and other once-stalwart local businesses that make up suburban memories. But it’s unlikely newsagencies will disappear completely. Some have diversified into selling gifts and gadgets, others keep up the classic stock of stationery, magazines and cards, convex mirrors mounted in the corners so the staff can watch for browsers reading magazines for too long. It is this kind of newsagency I always keep a lookout for.
Although newsagencies have been around since the 19th century, it’s in the 20th they flourished, as places to buy magazines, birthday cards, chocolate bars, exercise books or packets of cigarettes. In Sydney almost every suburb seemed to have a newsagency, and they became so much a part of everyday life as to be almost unremarkable.
Until they started to disappear. Observing this, I have made a habit of stopping every time I pass by one, and finding something inside to buy. At the front counter there is usually someone buying a lottery ticket or waiting to. Further in are racks of magazines and greeting cards, and shelves and displays of stationery goods, a museum of office and craft items. My collection of notepads, stickers, and pencils is increasing, and I’m always on the lookout for unusual and niche stationery items.
Crepe paper. Ribbon rosettes. Sheets of cardboard. Check tickets. Restaurant docket books. Telephone message pads. Rubber stamps that say ‘FAXED’ or ‘OVERDUE’, once used for invoices. Autograph books. Letraset. Teledex refills. Plastic stencils of the states of Australia, for school students to draw around, inscribed with the instruction: ‘Tasmania to be drawn free hand’.
My favourite newsagencies – and for now you can still find them out there – are pre-digital time capsules of paper goods, craft supplies, tubes of glitter and 2B pencils, and still hold the promise of all you might do with such things.
Through the Quadrangle Door
Posted: December 9, 2023 Filed under: Houses, Northern Sydney, Shops, Waterways | Tags: Cammeraygal country, castlecrag 13 CommentsThink ‘Quadrangle’ and an image might come to mind of the University of Sydney and the Quadrangle which forms its nucleus: grand sandstone buildings, gargoyles, perfect lawns and the (replacement) talismanic jacaranda tree.
Unless you frequently travel through Cammeraygal country, along Eastern Valley Way. In which case you might also think of the shopping centre that marks the entrance to Castlecrag. On the crest of the hill, at the intersection with Edinburgh Road, the half-illuminated neon sign for the Quadrangle glows on the corner, above the lichen-spotted awnings that shade a row of empty stores.
The Quadrangle has the forcefield of neglect that can only indicate an impending renovation or demolition. Indeed, this is the case, although plans to redevelop the corner have stalled, facing strong public opposition to the height and scale of the new development.
Such changes are often contentious, but particularly so in Castlecrag, which has an identity forged from the Burley Griffin’s 1920s vision of a more organic suburbia. Residents were to live in harmony, rather than opposition, to the environment. The remaining original houses have become emblematic of this dream of the garden suburb. On weekends, tour groups trail around the streets, looking out for the flat-roofed stone houses the Burley-Griffins designed in the 1920s, hearing about their designs for a more community and environment focussed way of living. No fences, flat roofs to better allow views of the harbour, twenty-percent of the land kept aside for parkland, an open air theatre for dramatic performances. The streets, named after the parts of a castle, followed the contours of the headland.
The Quadrangle appeared much later in the history of Castlecrag’s development, opening in 1979. If it features at all in the heritage tour, it is as the place to park before setting out on foot into Castlecrag proper. Underneath is a cave-like parking lot, from which you ascend up the stairs into the central courtyard. Not so long ago it was a busy suburban shopping centre but now there’s only a post office, one remaining boutique, and a pharmacy with a rack of sunglasses and a life-size Santa out the front, which activates into song whenever someone gets close to it, alarming or amusing people on their way in to buy medications.
As the name suggests, the Quadrangle is built around an internal courtyard, where once, when the cafes were open, you could sit under a marquee and drink coffee, on your way to or from the IGA (or in the 80s, Jewel Food Barn). The entrance to this area from the street has a folly on the roof: a shuttered tower with a lightning rod on the top. Underneath this is a glass door, unattached on either side to anything, as if the surrounding walls had been cut away.
I stop at the door and examine it, to the bemusement of the postal worker sitting on one of the café tables, taking a rest from deliveries on this hot afternoon. There’s a handle on one side of the door, but not the other, and I push down on it, testing to see if it is unlocked. The handle yields, and I push open the glass door and walk through, a test of the door’s absurd existence.
Is anything different now that I am on the other side?
Still as hot, still as desolate in the Quadrangle, although the nearby community noticeboard attests to some of the life of the suburb: bushcare, dog-walking services, a map of Burley Griffin sites as a self-guided tour, advertisements for books by local authors. This includes a reprint of a 1970s book that was put together of stories from residents, with photographs from Max Dupain, who was himself a Castlecrag resident. Dupain’s photographs of Castlecrag show its development over the mid-century decades, in photographs of houses, trees, neighbourhood events (including the launch of the book), plants and animals: cockatoos, flannel flowers, cats, a gecko on the curtains.
Following the main road, I pass by a couple of the Burley Griffin houses, low stone buildings with long narrow windows, humble in appearance compared to many of the houses that were built after them. Most of these original houses have been modified or added to over the years, since they were built in the 1920s, and stood starkly on the cleared ground.
As well as the lots for housing, the plan for Castlecrag included a network of reserves, parks connected by pathways that run in between and behind the houses. The pathways are narrow and easy to miss or to mistake for driveways, but if you follow them they will lead to a small, hidden reserve of land. Each has a different character. Lookout Reserve expands into a stretch of lawn, with a bench under a tall Hoop Pine, looking onto a paperbark tree, said to have been planted by Marion Mahony Griffin, with Spanish Moss trailing from its branches.
Down steep steps from The Bastion is a path leading to a network of reserves (Embrasure, Gargoyle, Oriel) that follow the line of a rocky ridge, making for a cooler environment of tree ferns and moss under the rock outcrops. Long strips of bark shed from the trees are underfoot, glimpses of the bay in the distance appear through the gaps in the trees and roofs.
No one is in sight apart from the occasional posse of builders working on a house, and I can hear their music coming across, mixing with the sounds of the cicadas, and lawnmowers from further away. Some of the paths are so narrow, so close to the backyards of the houses, that I feel the urge to walk with soft steps, as if I were trespassing. But there’s no one to see me, just people’s washing hanging out to dry, and a quiet brown dog that looks up at me with a quizzical expression. Air conditioning units huffing out hot air are the clues that if anyone is around, they are sheltering inside.
The streets in Castlecrag, like the pathways and the reserves, follow the shape of the land, forested and steep with large boulders, leading down to the narrow, mangroved inlets of Middle Harbour. It is urban bushland, where the pipes and manhole covers hide among the rocks, stepping stones have been laid out to aid navigation, and houses and backyard pools are never far away, but the pathway feels secret nevertheless.
As I follow the hill downwards, via some more castle streets, the Citadel and the Bartizan, I stop at the Haven Amphitheatre, the open-air theatre which was created by Marion Mahony Griffin and locals, for performances by the Haven Valley Scenic Theatre and the Anthroposophic Society. Rows of terraced seats have been constructed following the hillside, looking down over the small circular stage. Today, the wind puts on the performance, making the trees sigh, moving shadows over the ground, over the further patterns of leaves and stones.
The pathway to Sailors Bay starts at what looks to be a driveway, but at the end of it I can see the start of the bushland path and its arrow marker. There’s a person in their garage beside the driveway, looking inside their overflow fridge, but they don’t turn around when they hear my footsteps, or maybe I’m too quiet to be detected. I hurry by. At the start of the path I walk through a thin skein of spiderweb, which snaps like the ribbon at the finish line, evidence that no one else had walked this way for a few hours or more.
In some parts of the suburbs, particularly areas of bushland, there’s a sense of people being all around, but they’re just far enough away that the other life of the place is more present than the human one. At Sailor’s Bay, after I make my way across the shore – littered with the usual packets and plastic, but also odder things, a plastic shuttlecock, a Santa Pez dispenser – I wade out between the oyster shells and the mangrove roots, feeling the soft sandy mud underfoot.
The water is warm in the shallows. It has absorbed the heat of the day, and now it is the hottest part of the afternoon, and I know I will have to walk back up the hill to the Quadrangle eventually. But I won’t think about leaving just yet.
Two Journeys with the Putney Punt
Posted: April 30, 2023 Filed under: Sydney Harbour, Technology, Waterways | Tags: breakfast point, city of canada bay museum, mortlake, mortlake ferry, putney punt, Wallumedegal country, wangal country 8 CommentsOn display in the City of Canada Bay Museum is a model of the car ferry that crosses the Parramatta River between Mortlake and Putney. Although officially known as the Mortlake Ferry, it is more familiarly known as the Putney Punt. The service has carried traffic across the stretch of river between Mortlake, on Wangal land to the south, and Putney, on Wallumedegal land to the north, since 1928.
Among the varied collection of the museum, the model of the ferry can be found in between a glass case with a wedding dress inside of it, and another with a model of one of the gasometer tanks that used to dominate the Mortlake peninsula when it was a gasworks. The model of the ferry is long and narrow, bracketed by a wharf on either end, with a track between, on which the ferry moves once you press the green button on the side of the case. It’s meticulously made and specific in its details, the little round lifebuoys labelled with DMR (Department of Main Roads, which became RTA, now RMS) and a box of life jackets, as well as some very 70s-looking Matchbox cars parked on the ferry itself, and little reflective road signs at each wharf showing the timetable.
I press the button and the motor starts up. The ferry begins to move across the painted river, slowly advancing towards the Putney side. The motor hums as it makes it slow way, before stopping with a click once it reaches its destination. At first I had thought the model had been built specifically for the museum, but in fact it had been made by the DMR for display at the wharf, alongside where the actual ferry plies its route across the river. It had been housed inside the waiting room on the Mortlake side as a curiosity, demonstrating the ferry’s mechanism – how it operates by two cables, one which pulls, and one which guides, conveying it from one side to the other.
When the model was displayed at the wharf it was thought the ferry would be decommissioned. By the late 1980s, when plans to remove it were afoot, the punt was regarded as a relic of Mortlake’s industrial past, in operation as it was for the convenience of the employees at the gasworks, who would come across from the north side to go to work.
It was the last of the car ferries in metropolitan Sydney: others, at Ryde, Tom Ugly’s Point, and The Spit, had all long-before been replaced by bridges. Recognising the Putney Punt’s significance, there were protests about its removal and about the proposed $1 toll if it did remain. The National Trust listed the ferry and although the gasworks was redeveloped into the residential suburb of Breakfast Point, the ferry has continued to operate. The model did not fare quite so well at the time, falling into disrepair, before being retired to the museum. Here, it was restored back to working order by the local Men’s Shed.
Mortlake is only a slip of a suburb now, a mixture of houses, apartments, and a few remaining small factories along the road that leads to the wharf. After the road passes by the factories and apartment buildings, all of a sudden there is a sharp turn to the right. Then there’s the unusual sight of the road extending all the way to the edge of the riverbank, beyond the boom gates where cars wait to cross.
It is a quiet day, a public holiday, and there are no other cars waiting behind the stop sign. I’m the only one, and I get out to step closer to the gate, to look across at the ferry, which is over on the Putney side, with a few cars slowly driving onto it. To either side of the wharf the headlands curve in and out around the water, which is a pale silvery blue on this overcast day. In the distance, over in the east, the city skyline looks smaller than I expect it to, its high-rise buildings more spread out from this vantage point.
The ferry is making its way across now, painted cream and green, familiar from the model, slowly advancing and enlarging as it draws closer. It reaches the wharf and stops with a thunk as the lip of the ferry aligns with the road, and the cars drive off. Then it’s my turn. The ferry master beckons and I drive forwards, stopping in the front middle of the three lanes. It doesn’t feel unusual until the ferry gets going, away from the wharf and out across the river, and I have the sensation of the car moving while being stationery, a more fluid, buoyant motion than driving.
It’s fun to traverse the river this way, a change of perspective, suddenly afloat, in what was described in an article about the punt from 1954, as ‘a moment of leisure’, and ‘four minutes of enforced inaction, as refreshing as a summer shower’. At that time, in the 1950s, with industry in full operation, the river was polluted and its beaches choked with piles of rusting debris, and the water, so the article describes it, was a ‘drab maroon with the noisome effluent from the gasworks’. It has come a long way towards repair since that time.
For all its shift in perspective it’s only a quick journey, and after a couple more minutes the punt comes in at an angle to the Putney wharf, working with the resistance of the tide. It swings into place at the last minute, pulled in by the thick metal cables. The boom gate opens and the ferry master beckons me to drive forward, and suddenly I’m on the north side, among the suburban streets, driving past houses with bright purple tibouchina flowers in their gardens, back on solid ground.
Penrith Museum of Printing
Posted: December 4, 2022 Filed under: Western Sydney | Tags: letterpress printing, penrith, penrith museum of printing, print museum 12 CommentsThe jacaranda trees are in flower around the Paceway, and a carpet of mauve petals surrounds the unassuming green shed that houses the Museum of Printing. Apart from the row of flags which announce the museum is open, swaying in the wind, and the magpies pecking at the lawn by the racing track, all is still. It is Sunday morning and, apart from the sound of the traffic on Mulgoa Road, it would seem like not much is happening in this quiet corner of Penrith.
Inside the museum it is a different story. At first I’m not sure what to expect from the sign that promises I’m about to meet the Linotype machine, the Eighth Wonder of the World. I am not quite able to imagine what lies behind the folding doors with a print of woodcut of a 15th century printing workshop on them. As an introduction, a display cabinet in the lobby has a display of various pieces of printerly ephemera: an invitation to the Copy Boy’s Picnic, instruction manuals and samples of type. I’m looking at this when the doors open and one of the museum guides welcomes me in.
It is busy in the print museum: every corner of it has a volunteer working away at something. One man has the top of one of the machines open and is cleaning it with a strong-smelling solvent, dipping a paintbrush into a saucepan, then leaning down into the mechanism to apply it. In the back corner, two men work with trays of type, and on the other side of the room, another operates a printing press. There’s a whirring, rattling sound as the press operates, which resounds through the room. It is as busy as I imagine print shops were when machines such as these produced anything printed: newspapers, books, office stationery, leaflets, everything before printing technology changed and these kinds of machines were thought to be redundant. Many of them were scrapped, but others, like these machines in the museum, have been saved by the efforts of printers who worked with them for decades, cared about their historical significance, and wanted to see them preserved.
Everything here works, the guide tells me, gesturing to the printing presses and the linotype machines. One tall iron press at the back of the room is painted green and has a gold eagle on the top: a weight, the guide tells me, not just a decoration. It is a Columbian Press, which was used to print the Carcoar Chronicle and then had another life on display in the foyer of Fairfax: the first copies of the Sydney Morning Herald had been printed on a similar press.
As we move around the museum, parts of the story are taken up by each of the volunteers. A compositor tells me how you could handset type as small as 2 point, so small it was barely readable, just by knowing the location of it in the case. He asks my name and, quick as a flash, hovers his hand over a tray of type and my name is set, upside down and back to front, in the composing stick. For posters they would use big blocks of wooden type, to print things like headline display posters, the kind that would be put outside of newsagencies. Another compositor tells me that, when Elvis died in 1977, they had used the largest letters of all to make the headline announcing this, as if that didn’t happen very often.
On to the eighth wonder of the world: the linotype machine. The man with the saucepan and brush pauses his cleaning operations and turns to show me how the Intertype – a tall and complex metal cabinet with a small keyboard at the base – operated. It had been invented in the 1880s by a watchmaker, he told me, who applied the mechanics of watch movements to devising a typesetting machine that would cast text out of molten lead, line by line.
The typesetter sits at the keyboard and types out a line of text, activating the machine, which rattles into life. The matrices – the metal pieces used to cast the type – drop down from a cabinet above and move through the machine with such precise, swift action that, by the end of the demonstration, I agree it is indeed a wonder. The typesetter had worked in a room that had 136 of them, noisily churning out the daily news. You were paid by the line, he told me, and if the machine malfunctioned you had to ring a bell that would bring the mechanic over to fix it. All major newspapers had rooms of linotype machines, like this one from around 1930, at the Sydney Morning Herald.
So I continue around the museum, seeing each of the machines in action. The largest of the presses, the Wharfedale Press, had begun the museum’s collection, along with other machines that had printed the Nepean Times, a local paper that had ceased operation in the 1960s. The inventor of the Wharfedale, the printer told me, would, when he was devising it, wake up in the night and sketch out ideas for the mechanism on his bedhead. Printers, I note, are drawn to details and idiosyncrasies. They seem to have a great respect or even love for the machines that they operate: feeding in sheets of paper, typing out lines of text, activating the foot pedal that drives the press to make its impressions.
The museum has been here, in the green shed at the corner of the paceway, for over twenty years, and is unique in its status as a working print museum. A few days before visiting I had been alarmed to hear that, with a proposed new sports stadium development in the planning, they are threatened with eviction. While known and loved in the printing community, the museum has a quieter presence in Penrith than other attractions: the prominently signposted Museum of Fire, or the ever-growing Panthers. The museum faces an uncertain future, but for now, the machines print on.
Thank you to Stephanus, Graham, John, George and all at the Penrith Museum of Printing.
A Telex from Bankstown
Posted: July 6, 2022 Filed under: Technology, Time, Western Sydney 20 CommentsTo the north side of Bankstown station the rows of shops are under a cloak of rain, with a grey sky above. It has been a few years since I’ve last been over this way, and through the gloom of the rain I look for some of the details I remember: a ghost sign for curtains and home linens, ‘Optical House’, and the inscrutable facade of the Telstra Museum. As long as I’ve known it to be there I’ve wondered what is inside, the building’s plain appearance only heightening its mystery.
This time, I go up to the entrance, and seeing that it’s a Wednesday and the sign indicates it is open, I press the doorbell. Nothing happens for a little while, but I wait. There are few clues to it being open from the street, the windows have frosted glass and heavy grilles, which make it difficult even to see if the lights are on inside. But after a minute or so the door opens, and a museum guide welcomes me in.
Never have I been in a room with so many telephones. Immediately it is clear this is a comprehensive and loved collection of telecommunications objects, arranged by type and category, in aisles signposted ‘telephone exchanges, public telephones’, or ‘morse code, teleprinters’. Soon I’m examining a row of public telephones, pointing out to the guide the ones I remember: ah, the gold phone, phone of my teenage years.
Telephone technology has undergone constant change since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, progressing from contraptions of wires and bells and plugs, through a series of advancements towards digital systems, a narrative documented here in the Telstra Museum through objects and ephemera.
My guide, like many of the museum’s volunteers, had worked for PMG, the Postmaster General’s Department, which handled post and telecommunications before the services were split in the 1970s, into Australia Post and Telecom. He shows me how the switchboard exchange mechanisms worked and we take up a bakelite phone each to role play a phone call as he guides me through the operation of the pyramid switchboard. Switchboard operators were generally women, who were thought to be more patient and polite for a job which required continual conversations with callers: my fumbling attempts were once actions conducted with great speed and precision.
We examine exchange equipment, morse code machines, teleprinters, and the Muirhead-Jarvis Picture Transmitter, which relayed news photographs by telegram, in a machine housed in a cabinet something like a piano, that prefigured the fax machine and the photocopier. One aisle is dedicated to domestic telephones, including a rotary dial phone in gold, which is, I see when I go up close, ‘the one millionth telephone manufactured by STC’.
Other phones have tapestry covers, or are wall mounted and in a range of colours (Powder Blue, Maize Yellow, Cinnamon). A photocopied illustration shows the Dolly Vardin cover that was fashionable in the early 1900s with those who found the sight of the telephone unattractive, a doll with a long lacy skirt, tall enough to cover over the telephone underneath.
These phones and communication devices were once regarded as new, then became everyday items, then were outmoded, to finally became museum pieces. In one section are the first mobile phones and car phones, big clunky bricks that cost many thousands of dollars in the 80s and 90s. I’m drawn to an earlier innovation, an alternative 1960s design for landline phones. The Ericofon, the guide tells me, came to be popular for use in airport operations, but they weren’t so popular in homes, because if you needed to put the phone down mid-call you had to remember to put it on its side, or else you’d hang up on the caller.
In the last row of the museum, beside a radio studio and ‘television operations centre’, is George the Speaking Clock. You have George? I ask, with a growing sense of excitement. In 2018 I wrote an essay for the Powerhouse Museum book Time and Memory, and researched 20th century methods of time keeping and recording, of which George was one. I draw closer to the machine which had once announced the current time to callers, from a series of three glass discs on which was recorded the voice of a radio announcer named Gordon (not George) Gow. One disc held the hours, one the minutes, and another the seconds, and the machine selected the correct combination of numbers according to the current time.
In the essay, I had described a call to George: “Upon calling B074, callers heard Gow’s voice cycling through the 4320 announcements that made up one day’s worth of time. At the hour, when the time announcement was followed by ‘precisely’, his voice seemed to relish the crispness of the word — indeed, the speaking clock was advertised as being accurate to within one-hundredth of a second.”
In his heyday, George attracted many thousands of calls a day, but here, in the Telstra Museum, he reads the time just for me, as the guide wakes him up for a solo performance.
Telegram stationery, pneumatic tubes, post office memorabilia, Beepa the Owl (the 1980s Telecom mascot), Telecom-patterned tableware… there was seemingly no limit to the technical and cultural ephemera of communications, and I vowed to return, another day, for a morse code demonstration and further investigation of the collection.
Like George and the Goldphone public phone, the crockery was familiar to me too. Many years ago I’d bought a Telecom teacup from an op shop, and so after navigating the wet, potholed streets back home, I settled down to warm up with a cup of tea in my own piece of telecommunications history.
_
With thanks to Jeff and Bob for their museum tour and demonstrations.
Ten Years of Mirror Sydney
Posted: May 20, 2022 Filed under: Announcements | Tags: Mirror Sydney 9 CommentsTen years ago, in May 2012, I pressed ‘publish’ on the first post on this blog. With Mirror Sydney I wanted to turn a reflective eye onto the city and the suburbs, and record observations of places that were in some way out of step with the more rapaciously-changing, exclusive version of the city.
I started with a place that had been emblematic to me when I first moved into the inner city, the Camperdown Velodrome. When I came to know the velodrome, in the late 1990s, it was disused and overgrown. A few years afterwards it would be remodelled into a park and would cease to have a hold over me, but for that in-between time it carried the promise of the kinds of places I was drawn to, ones outside of the ordinary, where there was a stronger sense of the layers of time that make up the city. In its abandonment it had a sense of possibility, one shared by many places I have written about since. Such places suggest through time, and into the many versions of Sydney that co-exist, clashing and interweaving.
Mirror Sydney has become a view of the city that brings attention to what is just outside of immediate perception. This might be places hidden in plain sight, that hold some kind of resistant or subversive force, or anachronistic places that meddle with the illusion of now being only the present moment. Many of these places might be considered vanishing, or disappearing, but Mirror Sydney is as much about endurance, and persistence: what remains around us in our daily lives, in our memories, and in the stories we tell about the places that mean the most to us.
Thank you for reading and supporting Mirror Sydney in its various forms – blog, book and podcast – over the last decade, and I hope it has gone some way to inspire your own thoughts and connections with the city and its places. The Domain Expressway still runs, the ghost platform still fascinate, new contenders for the city’s ugliest building regularly arise, and there is always more to notice.
In Bexley North
Posted: May 8, 2022 Filed under: Gardens | Tags: 1964 olympics, bexley north, Gardens, the cure, Wolli Creek 18 CommentsAt the main intersection in Bexley North, traffic snarls by, lurching towards or away from the M5 on-ramp on the far side of the Wolli Creek valley. On one side of the intersection are shops, built in the 1930s, when the East Hills railway station opened and the suburb with its rows of red-brick houses came into being. On the other side is the Bexley North Hotel, a supermarket, and a row of shops with a wide carpark in front of them, hidden behind a screen of trees, lawn, and overgrown garden beds. This, a sign indicates, is Nairn Gardens.
I wasn’t paying Nairn Gardens particular attention, apart from noticing it had a substantial sign for a small, nondescript park, but as I continued on the path through the gardens, something else caught my eye. A round bronze plaque with a colourful insignia on it, on the side of a concrete structure that enclosed a row of benches. From this, I learnt that the Gardens had, in 1966, won second prize in the Sydney Morning Herald Garden Competition. I looked up, across the overgrown rockeries, a tangle of rosemary, foxtail grass, and tall conifers leaning askew, and tried to imagine the prizewinning garden hidden somewhere within it.
In 1966, it was described by the judges thus: “Much thought has been given here, with a rather difficult terrain, to produce a delightful effect which will improve even further as some of the subjects mature”, and further, “Several young poplars form an attractive background to an Olympic torch fountain, while an outstanding soulangiana magnolia and crotalaria added their charm. A well designed rock garden, with rosemary, hebes, dwarf conifers, nandinas, goldfussia, diosmas, mesembryanthemums, sedums, and alpines, gave a great permanency to the display.”
The rocks were still there, in terraced rows leading down from street level, and the rosemary and the conifers had matured into unruliness. Essentially, though, the winning garden had disappeared, apart from the plaques that commemorated the prize. It felt something like coming across a trophy in an op shop, engraved with a name and achievement, but disconnected from its champion.
The fountain had been installed with great fanfare in 1964, in commemoration of Bexley North’s Olympic medallist, the swimmer Robert Windle, who had won gold in that year’s Tokyo Olympics. The fountain had a prominent position on the corner, instantly noticeable to anyone passing by, whose attention would have been captured by the sight of a giant metal tulip, with a curtain of water cascading down from its stem, rising up out of a concrete dome into which slabs of stone were set. I like to imagine that when, in August 1980, The Cure played at the Bexley North Hotel, Robert Smith might have wandered across the carpark to contemplate the fountain’s lonely prominence on the corner.
Vanished fountain, unruly garden, the mesembryanthemums long gone. In 1995, the fountain was removed, and replaced by lawn and a row of flagpoles, and the garden’s flowers were replaced by hardier species. I sit on one of the benches and look over a palm tree in a hexagonal concrete planter, set in the cusp of the park benches as an object of contemplation. The wind blows big dry leaves from the plane trees and wisps of trash across the lawn and the path. Occasionally someone comes past, carrying a bunch of Mother’s Day flowers or a bag of shopping back to the carpark. The sky is a bright blue, with big mottled stripes of clouds cutting across it. I sit on the bench in the late-afternoon sun and watch them move and disperse, slowly changing into different shapes altogether.
Liner Notes: time travel in Five Dock
Posted: March 12, 2022 Filed under: ghost signs | Tags: five dock, ghost sign, QE2, the concorde, travel agency, wangal land 15 CommentsSigns go up in shop windows, announcing relocation, or the final sale, then the buildings stand empty. Nothing happens for a while, and it seems like maybe nothing will. But one day the demolition team arrives and begins to take the buildings down. The first thing they do is take off the awnings, so the buildings have a stripped look, pared back to the bricks. Where the awnings used to be attached a stripe of plaster, or brick, or sometimes the old signs of former businesses are revealed.
In Five Dock the strip of shops on the corner of Great North Road and East Street is the site of the new Metro station. The shops have been vacated, and the awnings removed to begin the process of demolition.
Above 163, a stretch of blue-painted sky is revealed, under which a cruise ship sails and an aeroplane lifts off. Not just any aeroplane: its distinctive wing shape and beak-like nose identify it as the luxury supersonic passenger jet, the Concorde. A trip on the Concorde was a journey like no other. Travelling at twice the speed of sound you would nevertheless be in perfect comfort, sipping French champagne. Smoked salmon and foie gras was for entree, lobster Newberg for main, and heart of palm for dessert, as you flew swift and supersonic over the ocean.
Mostly the Concorde flew the transatlantic route, between London and New York. But in 1985 the Concorde made a special record-breaking flight from London to Sydney. This was the second time a Concorde had made this journey. The first time had been for a publicity tour in 1972, when the jet was met by aviation enthusiasts as well as protesters, who carried signs that read ‘Ban the Boom’, ‘Doomsday Plane’ and ‘Atomic Fart’. Powerful jet engines and its distinctive shape gave the Concorde the ability to travel at such high speeds, but created a loud, startling sonic boom in its wake. As peaceful as it was for the passengers, on the ground below windows shook with a sound as loud and startling as an explosion.
In 1985, soon after landing, the crew were photographed on the boarding stairs holding bunches of flowers and a giant cardboard pocket watch, displaying their arrival time of 4pm, commemorating their record-breaking 17-hour flight. While this was happening, the Concorde’s passengers were transported to the harbour to start the next leg of their journey, on the QE2 cruise liner. This liner was the slow-going but sumptuous ocean equivalent of the Concorde, then the grandest, as well as one of the largest, cruise ships in the world. Fireworks and a lavish Valentines Day ball awaited them.
In Five Dock, I imagine the artist who painted the sign above the travel agency on Great North Road, up on a ladder, carefully at work, perhaps with this event in mind, and all that it promised for the future of luxury travel. The artist paints in a pale blue sky, and clouds trailing like streamers above the cruise ship. Birds flock around the ship’s hull and silhouettes of people cluster on the deck, looking over towards where the Concorde ascends. They were not to know the Concorde would only ever visit Sydney occasionally, before a devastating crash in France in 2000 would put an end to supersonic passenger travel. The skies were clear, the ocean wide.
mirrorsydney.wordpress.com 