I came across the gorgeous blog of Melbournienne Lucy Feagins.  She has done a great job blogging Gertrude St.  The beautiful photo of Amor y Locura above is hers.  I find so few blogs that I really want to read these days, but this is one of them. It’s so what blogs should be like: journalism without the corruption.  And with good photos.  Good blogs need good photos.  Free and ad-free.  But hers even boasts hand-drawn maps to die for.

Apart from Gertrude St, it has much of interest to whatever remains of Abbotsford Blog’s readership after its sad neglect by me.  For example, her posts on:

• Abbotsford’s Yello Diva (how to explain: just click on the link);
• Gertrude St’s Cottage Industries;
• the Gertrude St florist Mr Lincoln (move over Vasette);
• Abbotsford’s Mondo Trasho; and
• Abbotsford’s Studio Hacienda.

But then just about everything else is likely to be of interest.

There are some wonderful homeware places for the well-heeled in Abbotsford proper in addition to all the lifestyle supermarkets in Bridge Road.  There’s Orient Express, where you can buy Asian people’s cultural heritage.  There’s Mondo Trasho, cool in every way, and then there’s one of my favourite shops, Zelij.  It’s a Moroccan importer (alas, Maison de Tunisie, a lovely little place on Smith St towards Victoria St a few years ago is no more).  It has beautiful Moroccan lights, bowls, Moorish tiles, tableware and cookware, and some distinctive rugs and armchairs and sofas. Also, lots of Moroccan cookbooks and books with titles like ‘Moorish Style’.

Usually, Zelij’s unbelievably expensive.  Today though, is the last day of their warehouse clearance: there are few prices marked on anything, but presumably it’s walking out the door at never to be repeated, crazy, crazy prices.  The warehouse is at 25 Russell St, Abbotsford, 3067.  The contrast between the wonderfully Moorish interior and the industrial brick warehouse exterior is kind of worth popping your head into, just for a gander.  Basically, it’s right at the southern end of Collingwood Station, near the Town Hall and the library.  Russell St runs between Gipps St and Langridge St, beside the railway line, one street towards Hoddle St from the street with the Carringbush Hotel on the corner.

On Monday I was frustrated again when I headed down to Babka for lunch. It was closed too.  Still hungry, I was diverted by Grub St Bookstore, where the genial bookseller looked very pleased when I asked him if he had any books on the history of Collingwood. He went out the back and returned with Growing Up in Collingwood, an A4 paperback self-published by John Ventura last year. It looks like a bloody brilliant social history. It is so unedited, so full of graphic design faux-pas, that it positively vomits authenticity. It has many photos, and the most classic hand-drawn diagrams of the author’s favourite childhood haunts, his family’s residence above the family fishmonger at 262 Jhonston St, and the like.

Ventura was schooled at St Euphrasia in the Abbotsford Convent:

“Sometimes we ordered our lunch via a brown paper bag with lunch money enclosed and our order and name written on teh bag. These were sent to the milk bar around the corner opposite the Yarra Falls knitting mill. At 12 o’clock, the bell would ring and we would all stand up to say the Angelus prayer. After dismissal, we all raced down to the milk bar to collect our lunch.”

He used to go to the first Coles Store, and to Foy & Gibson’s on Smith St:

“G.J. Coles’ first variety store opened in 1914 and in 1919 they advertised nothing over 2/6. I remember the glass tops over the goods displayed, probably stop us kids pinching things. Mum bought my stationery here and I also scored a metal frog that made a clicking noise. Remember those?

I think next door to Coles was the large retailer ‘Foy & Gibson’s’ a quality trader who begain in 1891. They made goods in a factory and mill complex between Wellington and Smit Streets. They had a variety of goods, Manchester, clothing, furniture, leather goods, soft furnishings, hardware, books, toys and sweets.

It was just magic for a 6-year-old to wander through the store. I well remember the systems of overhead cables in Foy and Gibson’s when you bought something, the sales assistant would place the money and docket into a brass container. This was then fitted into a bracket hanging from the cable. A quick flick and the container was propelled along the carrier to the upstairs office where the money was removed, checked, and the change and receipt returned by the same process. Meanwhile your purchase was wrapped neatly with string and your change refunded.”

Well, I’ve been nodding off again. You’ve just missed Melissa Jackson’s Fringe Festival performance. Her frantically making her famous hats in the front window of her Gertrude St shop in the leadup to what used to be called the Melbourne Cup and which we are increasingly accepting as the Spring Racing Carnival.

But here’s something that may be worth trotting along to: the Map 44 Urban Art tour at 2 p.m. this Saturday (14 October 2006) departing Dante’s, led by a man described in the official literature as half Aboriginal and half Ethiopian, Jason Tamiru. Seems many of the shop windows on Gertrude St between Smith and Brunswick Sts have been decorated and he’s going to show us around.

And now to Aesop (pictured). They have a beautiful website, I’ll grant them that. They peddle skin stuff at $60 for 200 ml, with quotes from Voltaire, Virginia Wolf, and Camus. They have redefined luxury on the back of the industro-chic so lapped up down the road at Industria, promising elixirs so wondrous — we’re talking topically applied antioxidants — that they are sold in these austere apothecary’s vessels.

The Age’s oddly named (Melbourne) Magazine got all gooey about Gertrude St on Friday, with a big glossy article by Stephanie Wood about ‘the hottest strip in Melbourne’. I ride Gertrude twice a day, favour takeaway from Tandoori Times, and am a general enthusiast. Things are moving fast down there, too fast for my liking. My barber man at Dr Follicles was a bit sniffy on Saturday that his place was not new and hip enough to get featured (he told me that Alia’s been renovated and changed hands, and again commended Little Rebel Bar to me). Radio Bar looks most promising — intelligence please.

Until recently I have loved Gertrude unconditionally: Crumpler, Dr Java under the previous management, Dr Follicles, the organic bakery, the Polynesian waiter at Arcadia in his pāreu? lavalava? laplap?. Now it’s more chichi than Chanel and the memory of Squizzy Taylor is fading faster than ever. The organic bakery has morphed into something similar but different. Whereas Dr Follicles was previously flanked by a grocer’s, it’s now flanked by an Aeosp concept store and a very swish breakfastry working on a liquor licence. Too many dress shops, the dresses too expensive too.

I would hardly even be surprised if Builders Arms and Yelza owners, Tracey Lester and Noel Fermanis tarted up what may be one of the most untartableuppable pubs in the inner city, the Renown Tavern, when Tracey’s finished with the Carlton Hotel, and has sold Yelza for $2.5 million. I used to buy VB there when I was Mario of Mario’s nextdoor neighbour in Napier St — I was a bit coy about taking Stella in a pub which was previously named Squizzy’s for a good reason. But it was a bit rich for Tracey to profess disenchantment at the marginalisation of Gertrude St’s “characters” by gentrification. Check out the renovations to the Arms and you’ll see what I mean. Check out Yelza and it will hit you in the face.

The thoroughly researched article has some interesting history and other tidbits of information which I propose to share with you in summary form, because I don’t think the article is available on line. It’s a good article, and worth getting a hold of if you can (Issue #24, October 06, came out, I think, with Friday’s Age).

The nuns who are a regular feature of the area around Rose Chong’s and the Builders’ Arms with their blue-edge white habits are from Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity. This you won’t find in the article, but according to Wikipedia, “journalists have estimated” that the order has an annual income of US$100 million, much of which is said by critics to be used by the Vatican for general purposes. They serve meals to the poor in Gore and George Sts, which run off Gertrude St.

The oldest shop on the street, which runs between the Exhibition Buildings and beyond Hoddle St into Abbotsford (named Langridge St for part of the way), is Harry Evans & Sons, the billiard table emporium. 82 year-old Gordon Evans moved his family business into the shop in 1957, paying 5,000 pounds for the building and 1,000 pounds for “the most obstinate of the 14 families squatting in the building”.

The very English and entirely caucasian Rose Chong at no. 218 is the second oldest. Her unique costume hire place has been there since 1980. In those days, bodies were strewn in the gutters outside the Arms of an evening. Before her, were the Macedonian and Albanian Social Clubs. How quickly one forgets. When I lived in Fitzroy, the Balkan grills were still there, the lonely last shutting up shop only last year.

Maria Frendo at Dante’s has been there for 10 years now. I remember walking in and introducing myself when they first started working on the extraordinary creation that the place is. When I make my sporadic appearances there she always greets me as if I am a regular with a seat reserved for me at the bar, but I didn’t know til I read the article that the bar was once the menswear counter at George’s. There’s nothing not to like about Dante’s.

It is a characteristic of the street that there are more owner occupiers than usual (Ladro not being one of them: that’s part of Rose Chong’s empire, which is expanding with the imminent opening up next door by her son of Roundhouse Roti). In addition to the abovementioned places, the Kayes own Dean’s Art.

That grotty little vacant block with the oversized signs on the corner of Smith and Gertrude Sts, near where a man exposed himself at me the other night, was sold recently for $890,000.

It is a street reeking of long ago more than almost any other in Melbourne. Things are old, and the old things seem more naturally embedded in present day. The wonderful Johnston’s Emporium, seen here in Livebird’s image, is a good example. Apparently, Melbourne’s oldest terrace building is to be found at numbers 64-78.

And I learnt that the Aboriginal gym where Lionel Rose used to train is open to whities as well as Aborigines. Apparently it’s a pretty quiet place, and I might look into it. Apparently, from the 1920s Gertrude St was a thriving and concentrated Aboriginal community centred on the revolutionary Aboriginal Health Service founded in 1979. That’s the derelict building painted in the colours of the Aboriginal flag outside which some — shall we say, heavy drinkers — customarily take in the sun. It was formerly a VD clinic.

I lived happily off Gertrude St for several years. From time to time people would warn me quite solemnly about its capacity for awful violence. I was never sure to what extent the street’s bloody past was haunting their imaginations; I got the feeling their fears were still not entirely unfounded, but never had cause for fear myself. The rooming houses and charitable institutions and St Vincent’s psychiatric facilities on the strip always ensured that the rough end of the street was alive and kicking, but they are apparently all being sold up now. My friend Jolyon’s short, brilliant, disturbed and iconoclastic trajectory came to rest prematurely in one of them and goodness only knows what profitable endeavour his last bed’s room is being put to.

More on this page.

Miss K and I went shopping at the Richmond Market in Gleadall St (home too of the Richmond Leisure Centre). When I was young, and was convinced by some subterfuge that pulling a market trolley for my father was an excitement to be looked forward to, there was a time when he gave up going to the Queen Victoria Market in favour of the closer Gleadall St Market. I was not impressed. Now I like it a lot. It is a plainer affair than the Queen Vic, but has everything one might need, including the pictured cafe: vegetables at real prices (spinach $1.90 instead of $3.80 at the supermarket, potatoes priced in cents not dollars per kilo), coffee, pastries, bread, fish, flowers, dried things, fruit. It’s open from 7 a.m. until 12.30 p.m. on Saturdays. Enquiries 9205 5555.

Having never previously meandered along Johnston St by Shank’s pony, I had thought it to be one of the world’s most ugly thoroughfares. I found the details I spotted on foot charming. It has other things going for it once it arrives in the ‘wood too: Ilk Bar, which used to be a milk bar and the emblem of which is an elk, and Kooshi (formerly Good Morning Captain). Back in Abbotsford proper is this nameless place, which I think must be the one that the Abbotsford psychiatrist I met at a party the other day swore was a perfect but overlooked place to have weekend breakfasts. Some other photos from the walk are here.