Month / May 2016

by Eddie

Should we save our corner shops?

malz

Ours are all skinny flat whites

You may have seen in the media about the poor deli owners in Scarborough who have been forced into a rooftop protest to save their business. It is due to be knocked down at some point to make way for yet more high-rise apartments. Read all about it here.

The Dodgy Perth team are not usually ones for taking sides in property disputes, so we’ll restrict ourselves to the simple question: is this deli a heritage building? And like all simple questions, there is no simple answer. And there’s no simple answer right now because no one has done the leg work to find out.

Once you could find these corner shops everywhere, but in an age of late-night supermarkets and 24-hour garages they are becoming increasingly rare. This Scarborough deli was built around 1940 and was thought of as a very modern shop for its time. After World War II, the owners added an asbestos residence next door with lounge, two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, laundry, garage and (of course) yet more asbestos for a roof.

Looking at a historic photo, the building has remained much the same as when it was built, except for the inevitable loss of its cantilevered verandah. The shopfront windows are particularly interesting, because they seem to be identical to the original (or may even be original!).

Is this enough to make a building a heritage place? This Scarborough deli is not, by any stretch, a fascinating building. In fact, it’s quite ordinary as a corner shop. But that might be exactly what makes it have heritage value. It is typical of its era, typical of its type, and could probably tell a thousand stories of its owners and customers.

And delis were often run by New Australians and women, and New Australian women for all we know. Do we have enough heritage places where we can tell their stories? Could a real-life and still open deli not be a great place to have heritage and a coffee at the same time.

If you feel like trying to save it, give the State Heritage Office a call on 6552 4000 and say you’d like to nominate the deli on the corner of Brighton Road and Hastings Street in Scarborough. They’ll make you fill out a form (it is a government department, after all), but it’s not difficult to do. And then at least we’ll know if this place is worth saving.

by Eddie

Carnival corpses of walking tongues

Thrilling-Mystery-November-1937

Thrilling maybe. Prohibited, certainly.

As a good Western Australian parent, you wouldn’t want your child to read ‘The Carnival of Crawling Doom’, would you? Let alone ‘Dead Tongues of Terror’ or ‘The Little Walking Corpses’. Of course not. Because you are a good parent, and you know Perth led the way in having such stories banned.

The federal Customs Act 1901 meant anything obscene, indecent or blasphemous or seditious could (and usually was) banned. Better still, the public was rarely told what was forbidden, and almost never the reasons behind such decisions. Like in 1933, when Aldous Huxley’s obscene Brave New World was prohibited. For some reason or other.

Over the next few years, people (read: the press) began to fret about American pulp fiction being imported into Perth. Enter Special Magistrate Alwyn Schroeder, who had his finger on the pulse of 1938. When one person pleaded to him that their “downfall” had been caused by an overseas nudist magazine, Alwyn decided something had to be done.

“I am not a prude,” Alwyn said, somewhat unconvincingly. After all, he had seen action in Egypt during WWI, which was somehow relevant in his mind. But it was quite clear to him that all the current social problems of immorality and depravity were directly linked to young boys and girls reading American magazines. Especially ones with horror and crime stories.

Alwyn demanded Canberra do something and, unfortunately, they listened to him. One month later, the Daily News declared ‘Perth Gives Lead to Canberra on Magazine Ban’. The Commonwealth Government started banning any title they disliked without having the inconvenience of mentioning which ones were now prohibited. The secret list grew month by month. By August 1938, 49 magazines were illegal and that was just the start.

Perth boys and girls were now safe, thanks to ‘Weird Tales’ being on the list, from reading H. P. Lovecraft, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Robert Bloch, and their eyes were saved from seeing illustrations for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry.

We should thank Alwyn Schroeder for the great care he took in protecting us from such evils, and call upon the government to do even more to stop us reading horror, crime and Romantic poetry.

Dodgy Perth thanks Chris Nelson’s amazing zine, Mumblings from Munchkinland (August 2012) for having inspired this post. Also, Alwyn Schroeder appears as a character in Deborah Burrows’ recent Perth-based novel, Taking a Chance, which is all about crime. So you probably shouldn’t read it.

by Eddie

Progress is not for everyone

Town_Hall_1872

Now available in other colours

What has the opening of the Town Hall on Barrack Street got to do with feminism? Give up? Well, let Dodgy Perth mansplain it to you then.

Everyone needs to tell stories, about themselves, their family and their community. For most of the last two centuries, the (white) people of Western Australia have told their history using one word: ‘progress’. And every new building, no matter how boring or ugly, was welcomed as yet another sign of the progress of this great state.

So it should come as no surprise to find that on the official opening of the Town Hall in 1870, a huge banner was put across Barrack Street with the word PROGRESS on it, for people to march under on their way to the new building.

But there’s a problem with this word. It doesn’t just apply to new buildings, but also to society. Little things like women’s rights, for example. If the fair sex keep hearing about how we’re progressive, they might decide they would like a little of this progress too.

At the Town Hall ceremony, there wasn’t much sign of this progress. The hall itself was filled only with the important men of Perth while the womenfolk were consigned to the gallery. The men feasted and drank the booze, while their wives simply looked on without even a sandwich.

But still, this whole progress thing had to be dealt with, and it fell to the Colonial Secretary, Frederick Barlee, to spell it out. Proposing a toast to the health of the ladies, like every misogynist before and since, he announced that no one could be more devoted to women.

As a lover of ladies, Fred continued, he well knew the power and influence they had over men. (Even if this did not extend to getting anything to eat or drink.) Recently he had been reading about something called “women’s rights and female suffrage”, and worse about women entering professions and becoming scientists. Not, of course, in Perth, but elsewhere in the world.

But, said Fred, addressing the gallery, none of the good and true women here would wish to see any such nonsense brought about. After all, they already knew how much power they had without needing legal rights. Nor did women need the vote, since all men did was vote the way they were told by their wives anyway.

The Colonial Secretary then called upon all present to drink to the health of the ladies by gulping down nine large mouthfuls of booze. Well, not all could drink of course. Some were in the gallery.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was what 1870 called progress.