Category: Melbourne Arcades

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Welcome back! This week’s post started off as a very quick musing on something I became interested in during my thesis but had ended up as a dead end. So, I very quickly wrote a ‘short’ post on it, thinking I might just think through some of the issues. Of course, this short post is now a bit of a long read, as I keep thinking of further avenues to investigate and it’s turned out much longer and more intricate than expected. It is now something of a thinkpiece on my own history practices as well as a specific site. But I hope it’s enjoyable for its dive into mid-1800s Melbourne during the goldrush years, layers of urban history, and some of the sources that we look at when doing this type of research.

During the research and writing of my thesis, there were a few arcades that bothered me. With some I couldn’t figure out if they’d been arcades in the nineteenth-century or had been modified in the twentieth. Still others bore the name ‘arcade’ and were mentioned in the newspapers but I was uncertain, if there were no descriptions, that they were the type of arcade on which I was focusing: with shops running along a central promenade (and usually a glass roof). In colonial Australia, the word ‘arcade’ was used for these types of buildings but also others, including large furniture or mixed business shops and, famously, for the Coles Book Arcade in Melbourne.

And then there was the Victoria Arcade in Melbourne. Early on in the research I came across this beautiful image (above) in the State Library of Victoria, depicting a beautifully ornate arcade, with some inscriptions.

Victoria Arcade, now erecting in Bourke Street East

Wharton & Burns Architects & Surveyors
30. Collins Street Melbourne

John Black, Proprietor
J.S. Campbell & Co., Lithographers

It also has a small ‘handwritten’ signature identifying the artist: STG – for Samuel Thomas Gill – and the date [18]53.

ST Gill, Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street East, Melbourne, 1853. SLV, H2087

Three years later, ST Gill, would go on to do a small sketch of the Queens Arcade and was to become a well-known and prolific chronicler of goldrush Victoria, including its urban environments. Even later, he would do another lively street scene in front of the Royal Arcade, completed in 1870, also on Bourke Street.

Possibly a companion or slightly earlier piece to that of the Victoria Arcade is another lithograph by Gill (below), also dated 1853, of Black’s Tattersalls Horse Bazaar on Lonsdale Street.

ST Gill, Tattersalls Horse Bazaar, Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, 1853. SLV, H2156

These two artworks demonstrate a grandeur and elegance that Melbourne entrepreneurs and officials were at pains to emphasise during this period, as they tried to ‘improve’ and ‘civilise’ the fledgling city. In reality, Melbourne at the time was far from this, with a rapidly expanding population due to the goldrush. Many still lived in the tent encampment south of the Yarra and other temporary structures, as well as portable (kit) iron and wood buildings imported from England, were erected to provide residential premises; the city was a building site, as the construction tried to catch up with the needs of the population.

Seeking to take advantage of this was entrepreneur John Black, born in Lancashire of Scottish ancestry. He arrived in Australia around 1852, likely drawn by the lure of the goldrush. Having worked for a London merchant prior to emigration, he promptly set up carrying goods between the goldfields, Geelong and Melbourne (Gibson-Wilde, 25). An advertisement in Pierce’s Commercial Directory from 1853 shows that he also had ‘stores’ on the goldfields, likely supplying a wide mix of needs for miners including food and equipment.

Goldrush immigrants often made more from businesses such as this than they ever would from gold and it appears that Black made a solid fortune in a short time. On 1 November 1853 John Black (as well as a man named Edward Gilbert) obtained an auctioneer’s license in Melbourne, likely in preparation for his two new ventures: the horse bazaar and the arcade.

Pierce’s Commercial Directory, 1853. State Library Victoria
John Melton Black, c1866–1867? Townsville City Libraries via Flickr

Black probably commissioned Gill to make the images of Tattersalls and the proposed Victoria Arcade when one or both buildings were in the planning stages. The Argus reported on the completed horse and cattle bazaar on 14 November 1853, noting it was an arcade-like structure “used for an hotel, livery stables, auction mart, cattle-yards, coach-house, warehouse for vehicles &c” (14 November 1853).

An advertisement from the Argus on 4 November 1853 tells us that plans for the arcade were publicly displayed in the finished bazaar for prospective tenants to view.

VICTORIA Arcade.—Parties requiring Shops in the new Arcade, Bourke street, are requested to apply early. The plans are to be seen at Tattersall’s Bazaar. Lonsdale street east. (4 November 1853, 8)

The Illustrated Sydney News told readers in greater detail about this planned urban enterprise:

COLONIAL ENTERPRISE.—Spacious as Mr. Black’s new Tattersalls, in Lonsdale and Bourke-streets, undoubtedly is, and creditable alike to the proprietor and the colony, it will be thrown completely into the shade by a new arcade which the same spirited speculator is about to erect as a continuation of the new Tattersall’s.

Immediately opposite, and running in a straight line, is the full acre allotment, the property of Mr. [O’]Sullivan, the timber merchant, and this gentleman has leased it to Mr. Black for eighteen years, at a rental of £3000 per annum. On this acre Mr. Black has bound himself down, in a heavy penalty, to erect an immense arcade, to consist of two-storied shops, forty feet high.

The two end buildings leading into Great and Little Bourke-streets, respectively are to be each four story houses; the whole is to be roofed with corrugated iron, and entirely finished by the 1st of April next. Every house is leased already at £250 a year (serving for both residence and business premises,) the tenants each paying down a bonus of £1000 on taking possession. This will probably be the most gigantic undertaking entered into by one individual south of the line. (26 November 1853, 4)

Until I found the Gill Victoria Arcade lithograph, my research suggested that no other building of this type was built in Melbourne between the Queen’s Arcade in 1853 and the Royal Arcade in 1869–1870 (one newspapers made a point of this lack when discussing the latter!).

An arcade named the Victoria – more properly the Victoria Arcade & Academy of Music – was later built on Bourke Street East in 1877, almost opposite the site slated for the 1854 Victoria Arcade. In addition to an arcade with shops, it included a theatre. This later became known as the famous Bijou, which ultimately had greater longevity than the arcade itself. While that is a story for another time, it confused me quite a lot when I found the 1853 Gill image. It was very common in nineteenth-century newspapers to not give a street address, so I wondered, was this an earlier iteration of that arcade? But it could not be as it was clearly identified as being on the opposite site of the street.

I then found a couple of newspaper reports in the 1850s that mention a Victoria Arcade as though it was completed: one year after it was first announced, we see a classified for a ‘Cook-shop to Let, with Fixtures Complete’ is identified as ‘next the Victoria Arcade’ (Argus, 10 November 1854, 3), while Chapman’s Music Warehouse is mentioned at Victoria Arcade a week earlier. Unfortunately, these seem to be simply mistakes of naming: Chapman’s, which was still in existence in the mid-1890s, was definitely located in the Queens Arcade, as many advertisements attest. It seems it would be an easy confusion, the Queen of the eponymous arcade of course being Victoria.

So what was happening here? Was the arcade built or not?

One fabulous source for identifying early buildings and their construction dates in Melbourne are the wonderful leather-bound volumes of building notices from the Melbourne municipal council, now held at Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV). They’re a little tricky to use and it doesn’t help that usually there often only a street name and not an address for these proposals, in the first two volumes at least.

When I delved into them (and it was wonderful!), I found some hints. In the first volume (1850–1853) I located a notice – 1118 for the year – ‘To build a Horse Bazaar’ on July 8 1853, with John Cotter named as builder for owner, John Black. On the next page, we are informed that works had commenced and the fee charged was £4.

John Black’s notice to build a horse bazaar, 8 July 1853. Public Record Office Victoria, Building Notices Register and Index (VPRS9289), VPRS 9289/P0001/1, 10/01/1850 – 18/08

But nowhere in late 1853 or early 1854 did I find a mention of a Victoria Arcade (although the Queens Arcade did appear in 1853). In the second volume, though, on 1 June 1854, Black’s name appears in the book at the head of another venture, with the notice of intent ‘to build a theatre’ on Bourke Street. This was the famous Theatre Royal, which opened very late in 1854, renowned in Melbourne until its last performance in the 1930s, but likely partly the causes of Black’s insolvency in 1855.

John Black’s notice to build a theatre, 1 June 1854. PROV, Building Notices Register and Index (VPRS9289), VPRS 9289/P0001/2, 18/08/1853 – 31/07,

Looking at other evidence, it becomes clear that the theatre was in fact built on the site slated for the proposed the Victoria Arcade in the Gill image, only 12 months after initially announcing the construction of the arcade.

An amazing c1860 map (known as the ‘Bibbs Map’) has been digitised recently in super high res and added to the City of Melbourne’s wonderful mapping site, with plans and aerial shots of the city layered over time. In it we can see that the Horse Bazaar and Theatre Royal ran in a straight line from Lonsdale to Bourke streets, just to the east of Swanston Street. We also know from the Illustrated Sydney News article above that the Royal was located on the the block of land where the arcade was to be constructed.

‘Bibbs’ map of Melbourne, c1860 (detail) showing Tattersalls Horse Bazaar at c222–230 (in blue) and Theatre Royal at c209–233 (in pink) Little Bourke Street. City of Melbourne Art and Heritage Collection, 1646167. This version is from City of Melbourne’s site maps.melbourne.vic.gov.au
‘Bibbs’ Map, c1856, showing Tattersalls and Theatre Royal. PROV, VPRS 8168/P3 Historic Plan Collection, Unit 46, MELBRL 12 Melbourne: [Melbourne. n.d.]

An earlier version from c1856 above, is also available in high resolution at Public Records Victoria, showing both buildings in greater detail, and its history is discussed in my colleague Barbara Minchinton’s article in PROV’s journal, Provenance.

I’ve not yet located any article that indicates that any decision was made to abandon the arcade nor construct the theatre. Perhaps these will turn up one day – I’ve not given up searching but it’s highly likely Black did not want to make a pronouncement about the change in his plans.

One advertisement for the sale of a partially completed ‘New Theatre’ in October 1854 is likely the Theatre Royal, as is the call for tenders for the completion of a theatre in early December. But the first mention of it definitely as Theatre Royal that I’ve found so far in the papers is the announcement on 22 December for its opening the following day.

On 23 December the theatre opened but in an incomplete form, with just the entrance buildings and promenade entry completed. That day the Argus advertised the ‘GRAND OPENING of the Lower Saloons and Superb Entrance Hall to the New Theatre Royal, Bourke-street east’, featuring performers such as Mrs Hancock, Miss Octavia Hamilton and infant pianist Miss Minnie Clifford, and performances continued in the promenade – Black perhaps needing to recoup some of the money already outlaid on his building ventures.

Theatre Royal, Melbourne, c1859? Photographer unknown. Copied? by Sears’ Studios, 1933. State Library Victoria, H20742

Looking at commercial directories is also a way to trace the development of buildings in the city. State Library of Victoria (SLV) and University of Melbourne have the well-known Sands & McDougall directories online for a selected number of years from 1857 to 1974 but all are too early for this conundrum.

So, I visited SLV and the helpful staff in the Newspapers & Family History Reading Rooms to investigate the earlier directories – held on microfiche. In Joseph Butterfield’s directory for 1854 (which would have been prepared in late 1853 or early 1854), there was no evidence of Tattersalls or an arcade. But the former appears in the same directory for 1855, named Tattersal’s (sic) Repository and Tattersalls Hotel, as does the Theatre Royal at 73 Little Bourke Street East as ‘New Theatre and Hotel Building’.

It was in fact not until mid-1855 that the theatre was fully completed and finally opened on 16 July. A large article singing its praises appeared in the Argus the week before:

As this magnificent Temple of the Drama is announced to be opened for the first time on Monday evening next, a narrative embodying the history of the edifice, and a description in detail of what has already been effected, may be interesting. … Mr John Black … notwithstanding many impediments which have periodically opposed themselves to the work he took in hand, has now the satisfaction of seeing his design practically carried out. (10 July 1855)

The article praises Black’s vision for the theatre – completely omitting that the site had once been slated for an arcade only 18 months previously. It tells in detail of the architecture and fittings and compares the building to London’s Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres and the expenditure of £60,000 in its construction (an amount equating to perhaps 9-10 million Australian dollars today).

So, why abandon the arcade idea? Did the cost of the building proposed in the first Gill image prove prohibitive? Did a theatre seem like a more secure return for Black’s outlay? Perhaps with the opening of the Queens Arcade in December 1853, there was insufficient interest in another similar edifice? Ultimately, it was probably a sound decision; the Queens was not a huge success and was converted to a hotel and dining rooms by around 1860, while the theatre lasted in some form for another almost 80 years.

Much of documentation related to the parcel of land since 1851, several years before Black built the theatre, are preserved in the Coppin Collection at State Library Victoria (SLV). Possibly one of the most famous nineteenth-century Australian actors and theatre entrepreneurs, George Coppin, took over the Theatre Royal from Black in 1856. The collection include leases and mortgages, not just for the theatre but also for the lots on which Tattersalls stood.

Prior to March 1854, fellow auctioneer Edward Gilbert took over Tattersalls from Black, possibly to free up funds for Black to build the theatre, and documents related to a mortgage between the two for that land and the Tattersalls business is also contained in this collection. They also show a number of varied interests in the theatre by a number of other Melbourne businessmen. These documents show and intricate and complex shuffling of money to try and finance new buildings in the rapidly growing city.

While the theatre itself was long-lasting, the financial woes of the colony likely caused issues for a number of those invested in both it and Tattersalls, including Black. The same article that praises the new building goes on to indicate that the financial troubles over the past year had made the work difficult. Following the exuberance of the first years of the Victorian goldrush, in 1854 a recession hit, causing significant unemployment (Broome 1984, 87), and this downturn seems to have been blamed for the slow construction of the theatre. As Dorothy Gibson-Wilde notes, several days later, Black was accused by letter writers in the Argus of underpaying workers and owing money to contractors (Gibson-Wilde, 2009, 108). But this was the least of Black’s troubles.

A humorous cartoon from Melbourne Punch, 2 August 1855 depicts the Theatre Royal box office, as ‘Mr Fastemanne’ invites two ladies to the theatre. Drawn at the same time many associated with the Theatre were in financial trouble, this perhaps was also a subtle hint at those problems. Artist: Nicholas Chevalier. Engraver: Frederick Grosse. SLV, MP00/00/56/73

We can see from the documents at SLV that huge sums of money were involved in developing both Tattersalls and the Theatre Royal, and that they inevitably bankrupted several people involved with them. The original mortgage above, was in the amount of almost £35,000 that Gilbert would owe to Black, who had spent considerable money on the Tattersalls buildings, and the theatre purportedly cost £60,000.

Gilbert almost immediately tried to lease and then sell the Horse Bazaar and, by June 1855, its abject failure resulted in his insolvency. Losses on the Bazaar totalled over £13,000. In one insolvency hearing in November that year, the Commissioner noted:

the insolvent had placed the whole of his capital in the speculation of Tattersalls, which speculation had unfortunately turned out an entire failure. (Argus, 12 November)

At the same time, Black was also declaring insolvency. While this has been blamed on the expense of the building the theatre and the fact that Black probably wasn’t the best theatre manager, it certainly should also be attributed to the economic downturn. Gilbert’s insolvency report in fact made specific mention of

the period when the insolvent took possession of Tattersall’s Horse Bazaar. The colony at that time was in the very height of prosperity. Speculation and enterprise were driving men on to undertakings of inconceivable magnitude; and there is no doubt that the insolvent was inoculated with the spirit of the times, and with his capital at hand aspired to become the master of a building which presented at that moment a princely fortune. (Argus, 23 August 1855)

But it also seems that those with vested interests in the business blocked him from selling it to Coppin earlier, when he might have broke even. For several years, the shadow of the failure of Tattersalls and Theatre Royal, followed others – also resulting in the insolvencies of Gilbert and Black’s solicitor, Frederic Bayne, who had taken on Black’s interests following the latter’s insolvency, and of John O’Sullivan, to whom Gilbert’s mortgage from Black had been transferred in 1854 (and who is listed as Tattersall’s proprietor, together with E Gregory, in the directory mentioned above).

Black himself got back on his feet, becoming manager of the new Princess Theatre on Spring Street for several years. Later, he moved to Queensland, where he became the founder and first mayor of Townsville, before returning to England in the late 1860s and dying wealthy man in London in 1919 (Gibson-Wilde 1982, 2009).

One of the documents related to the mortgages for the Theatre Royal. Between John Black, John O’Sullivan and Richard Rastall, 3 July 1854. State Library Victoria, Coppin Collection, MS SEQ 8827 BOX 13/3

Despite these beginnings, George Coppin was to make a great success of the Theatre Royal. He put on successful entertainments there for the rest of the nineteenth-century. Although the 1854/5 version was destroyed by fire in 1872, Coppin rebuilt a newer and even more impressive edifice immediately after and the theatre remained a popular Melbourne entertainment spot until its demolition in 1933.

Reading between the lines of these articles, and their silences, does make me wonder if the façade buildings of the theatre were, in fact, originally intended as the front of the arcade, although with modifications to the design. If we look at the images of the original theatre, we see that similar arched windows/entries planned for the arcade are also seen in the theatre entrance building. The centre entrance to the vestibule also mirrors that of the arcade, but with a square rather than curved arch. It also has not only wooden doors on the vestibule entrance but iron gates similar to those planned for the Victoria Arcade and which were common to buildings of this type.

I’ve been pondering this possibility for a long time and have really not come to any concrete conclusions. There were always more and better documented arcades to discuss in my thesis. But this is another rabbithole that I’ve jumped into the last couple of weeks and has led me down an archival adventure to be sure!

Perhaps other sources will also give an idea, such as diaries or letters from the period. I’ll also potentially do a systematic read through the newspapers for this year, rather than simply doing keyword searches in Trove. A few issues arise with searching online newspapers that mean you’ll never be quite certain to capture everything. One is that you inevitably come up with thousands of many options when searching, especially for the word ‘arcade’ or ‘Victoria Arcade’ or even ‘Victoria Arcade’, ‘John Black’, ‘Bourke Street’. Another issue is that often the quality of the printing of some original papers means that the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) doesn’t recognise everything accurately (hence Trove has an army of volunteer editors to correct the final results).

So, that’s where I’m at with it right now with this work-in-progress. When I do a bit more digging, I may have an update.

A postscript though: there is a twist in the fate of the site itself that might have had Black wryly shaking his head. After the Theatre Royal was demolished in 1933, the valuable site saw the construction of the large Mantons department store in modern Art Deco style. This business was eventually taken over by GJ Coles in the 1950s. The facade of Mantons was covered over and it was occupied by a succession of variety stores owned by the parent company of Coles-Myer : Coles Variety, then Target and, in 2021, KMart.

At some point during these changes, probably around 1994, renovations to the building included the formation of an arcade running through from Bourke to Little Bourke and, although modern and utilitarian, it runs just slightly to the left of where the promenade of Black’s planned arcade would have.

Exterior, Manton’s drapers, 226-236 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Lyle Fowler, c1952 H92.20/4125
Kmart Centre arcade looking from Little Bourke Street end, 2024. The Royal Theatre (and site of the Victoria Arcade) would have been where the main Kmart store is now. Photographer: Nicole Davis
Sign on KMart’s entrance about the site, 2024. The image is actually incorrect. This is not the Theatre Royal but the adjacent Hoyts Esquire/Deluxe movie theatre, later Mantons department store. Mantons later bought the Theatre Royal site to extend their store and built the the new Deco facaded building next to this Federation edifice. (Cooper 2020)

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I still have a bunch of three-quarter drafted posts, which are actually about the history of arcades, but thought today I’d give an update on research life lately.

I’ve been working hard with my fellow authors, Richard Broome, Andrew J May and Helen Stitt on a thirtieth anniversary edition of Weston Bate’s Essential but Unplanned: The Story of Melbourne’s Lanes, which will be released later this year by Royal Historical Society of Victoria and State Library Victoria. Bate also included the city’s arcades, many of which join up with the lanes, an essential part of the way we move through and experience the city.

For me, this has involved two seemingly diametric activities. Often it has consisted of sitting at a desk staring at directories, maps, and spreadsheets to work on tracking the histories of the lanes. But it also means extensive walking around Melbourne’s CBD to see if certain lanes actually still exist in our rapidly changing cityscape or determining some other aspect of their location past or present. On those days, my 10,000 steps are easy to achieve!

Working away at Royal Historical Society of Victoria on Melbourne laneway histories with very old and very modern sources!
Exploring Melbourne’s lanes on foot is rewarding … but gosh my feet get sore! Amazing mural by Gadigal artist Jeswri (Jesse Wright) in Equitable Place.

It’s been really amazing discovering unknown corners of Melbourne, as well as seeing the history of its arcades: from the long-gone 1853 Queen’s Arcade to the most recent iteration, the Melbourne Walk, a combined arcade and laneway complex, which should open towards the end of 2024.

The book is accompanied by an exhibition at RHSV, Melbourne’s Storied Laneways, curated by David Thompson, which opens 11 April. Further details can be found on the RHSV website.

There’s actually an important story for me with this book, but I’ll reveal that when we launch!

In other exciting news, my latest journal article came out! It was submitted in October 2022, prior to my PhD being finalised, and is actually based on one of the thesis chapters. ‘”One of the Sights of the Colony“: Australia’s Nineteenth-Century Arcades’ appears in History of Retailing and Consumption. This is part of the new special issue on Australian retailing, edited by Matthew Bailey, one of my colleagues at Macquarie University. It is not open access but people can contact me for an author’s digital print of the article if they don’t have university or other library access. The abstract gives you an idea of the focus:

The arcade is a nineteenth-century architectural and social form long associated with industrial modernity and consumer culture. Better known in the British and European urban landscape, they were also significant in the Australian colonial context from 1853 onwards, in numbers rivalling those in the so-called ‘metropole’. Australian entrepreneurs, architects and shop owners utilized what was seen as a very European form to represent the progress and civilization of the Australian colonies and their urban spaces, both in capital cities and smaller regional centres. The arcades, including their presence in the landscape, their architecture, and the commodities and leisure activities found within, were regularly invoked by boosters in order to demonstrate the sophistication of these colonial urban spaces. This article briefly discusses the history of the nineteenth-century Australian arcades, the boosterish discourse that promoted them, and how their representation was a way to express the place of the Australian colonies within a transnational milieu.

It was wonderful participating in this special issue with Matt and other colleagues who work on shopping, retailing and business history. Matt also gave a great overview in the introduction to the special issue of all the authors’ work, which is well worth reading too.

Queen Victoria Markets Building (now, QVB), 1898. Photographer: Charles Kerry. City of Sydney Archives, SRC18023

Another publication also hit the virtual shelves in December 2023, a book chapter also written with colleagues, this time from my other life working on the history and sociology of education. Although it seems somewhat different, for me all these topics tie into aspects of my wider interest in urban history, just from slightly different perspectives. This is, wonderfully, open access and represents just one of the outputs from an ongoing transnational collaboration, Connecting History of Education, involving academics from all over the world and led by a team in Spain.

Julie McLeod, Nicole Davis, Kevin Myers and Helen Proctor, ‘Mapping connections across fields of knowledge and international networks in the history of education: Australasia, Northern Europe and the United Kingdom’ in Andrés Payà Rico, José Luis Hernández Huerta (eds.), Conectando la historia de la educación Tendencias internacionales en la investigación y difusión del conocimiento (Octaedro, 2023). Our chapter

takes up the invitation to map the development of the history of education as a disciplinary field, traced through the activities of discipline associations and journals in two contrasting regions, Australasia and Northern Europe. Defining and putting parameters around these regions is of course a problematic endeavour, replete with longer geopolitical and imperial histories, including the positioning of some regions, such as Australasia, as somewhat peripheral or marginal to developments in northern metropolitan centres. While a full consideration of these matters is beyond the scope of the chapter, we note them at the start in order to signal the larger contexts both framing and unsettling these mapping exercises. There is also considerable heterogeneity within these broadly defined regions. Even so, looking at them side by side has revealed some common concerns and also some important differences in how the journals conceived of their mission in relation to issues of national histories and international outlooks.

More exciting things have been happening too but I’ll just mention one. Last year I was awarded a 2024 Visiting Fellowship with the Harry Gentle Resource Centre at Griffith University, Brisbane.

Harry Gentle was a Griffith University alumnus who studied politics and history in the 1980s at the Griffith School of Humanities. He left a generous bequest upon his death to support the study of Australian colonial history. The Harry Gentle Resource Centre (HGRC) at Griffith University was established to promote the study of the peoples and lands of Australia, with an initial focus on the area that became Queensland and its borderlands in the nineteenth century.

Harry Gentle Resource Centre: Visiting Fellowships

My fellowship is taking my thesis work a bit further, in preparation for writing a monograph on Australia’s arcades.

The project will explore the experiences and networks of nineteenth-century Queensland businesswomen. It examines establishments owned or run by women, and commodities or services they provided, in four arcades built during this period – in Brisbane, Charters Towers and Townsville. Sometimes disguised behind male relatives acting as faces of the businesses or historiography overlooking their participation, these women played a vital role in the Australian colonial economy and represented significant networks in global exchanges of goods, ideas and people.


Earl of Hopetoun, Governor-General of Australia, unfurls the Flag at the opening of the Townsville Municipal Buildings, 16 September 1901. The building’s arcade is under the dome at right of image. Photographer: WJ Laurie. Citylibraries, Townsville. 

I’m excited to be heading up there next week to begin my first couple of weeks of research. It will be great to meet the team at the centre and also catch up with friends and family in Brisbane.

I’ll likely be reporting on the fellowships a bit on my Instagram and Facebook page, so follow me and see what I discover!

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Eastern Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne, 1875, with banner for US Minstrels and images depicting the players. Photographer: NJ Caire/Anglo-Australasian Photo Co. State Library Victoria, H84.3/11

The Queen’s Arcade on Lonsdale Street in Melbourne, after renovations, reopened to great fanfare in March 1856, with a military band and a fountain of eau de cologne supplied by arcade fancy goods’ dealer Levy Bros, as well as

musical entertainments … varied by the performance of a powerfully toned apollonicon [a large barrel organ], which is intended in future to play at stated periods during the day, and thus prove a continual attraction to the passer-by to make use of this elegant avenue as a lounge


Age, 17 March 1856, 4

Arcades are often thought of purely as places of commodity exchange or places to eat and drink, with retail shops and tearooms often the focus of discussions both popular and academic. As I argue in my thesis, the arcades in fact reflected broader social and cultural aspects of urban life, with a wide variety of entertainments, including theatres, dance halls, hotels, balls and music in the promenades, and amusement parlours. As I note in Chapter Five, following James Lesh, arcades ‘catered for colonial Australian thirst for “amusements, performances and hospitality: novel forms of leisure and entertainment”[1] that were part of the global experience of modernity, many of which they might find within’ [2].

The entertainments in the arcades ranged in type. While there were more refined shows, such as art shows and elegant balls, displays at the ‘cheap amusement’ end of the spectrum were also found in these buildings, demonstrating the appetite for ‘new and innovative entertainments, many of which utilised new technologies in their presentation’ [3] but might also utilise the fantastical or seemingly strange to amuse patrons. While spectacle was a key component, these amusements might also be considered educative, about current or historic people and events, or new ideas and technologies.

The Queen’s Arcade was a regular site of such amusements, which also might play at other locations around Melbourne and Australia. These included models and panoramas of current events, such as important moments and sites in the war in the Crimea in the mid-1850s, including a model of the Sevastopol and Kronstadt naval bases, as well as St Petersburg. In 1855 and 1858, there featured an ‘exhibition of dissolving views‘ using a calcium light to project photographs, in the first case, including ‘places such as the Arctic regions, Turkey, Italy, Netley Abbey, and Walmer Castle‘, with the commonly applied entry fee of a shilling for adults and children at sixpence.

In the Eastern Arcade in Bourke Street Melbourne, there were a variety of such cheap amusements, as well as businesses that straddled the line between entertainment and health and wellbeing, such as phrenologists and fortune tellers. As these latter characters are the focus of the work of other scholars [4], I’ll focus here on the other amusements present in this building, but in another post, I might talk about these people in other arcades!

One of the other business-owners in the building also thought of innovative ways to attract people to the building. In 1879 fancy goods dealer Isaac Solomons hosted the Great American Pantechnetha in conjunction with a fancy bazaar, which featured panoramas of ‘the Prussian & Russian wars and views of the principal cities in Europe – surpassing anything ever seen in the Australian colonies’. He also later paid Dominick Sonsee, ‘the smallest man in the world’, to appear and hold an ‘at home’, where he chatted with visitors about politics and current events. Sonsee later, however, took publican Thomas Bentley to court over non-payment of the fee from Solomons, which Bentley had allegedly accepted on Sonsee’s behalf but not passed on, with newspapers rueing that Sonsee had been taken advantage of and portraying him in a pitying light.

 

Carte de visite advertisement for appearance of Dominick Sonsee at the Eastern Arcade, c1880.
Photographer: William Burman. National Portrait Gallery, 2014.5

The Eastern Arcade also had two dedicated entertainment spaces which featured entertainments such as the US Minstrels and Lady Court Minstrels (the latter also played at the Victoria Arcade & Academy of Music in 1884), and Kate and James Kelly, siblings of bushranger Ned, who held a rather grim entertainment where patrons could see and talk to them for one shilling prior to their brother’s execution in November 1880. In the same arcade in 1914, Seattle-born George and Leo Whitney, who had been leaseholders of Luna Park, Melbourne, opened the Joy Parlour amusement arcade in nine of the arcade shops, ‘entertaining hundreds of people both day and night with all kinds of amusement and picture shows. … Beautifully lit with electric light, and music always‘. According to the oral testimony of George K Whitney, his father (also George) ran the shooting and amusement section of the arcade, while his uncle ran the photography studio, before moving back to the US in the 1920s.

Bourke Street in the area of the arcade was well-established as the heart of Melbourne’s popular entertainment during the late 1800s. The atmosphere was beautifully described around 1912 by future journalist, Hugh Buggy: ‘a non-stop vaudeville show … [with] its music halls or “academies” of music, its billiard parlours, its shooting galleries, and a waxwork chamber of horrors … it was the heart of Theatreland and the stomping ground of sports.'[5] Both the Eastern and the Victoria Arcade and Academy of music on the next block contributed much to this atmosphere. These entertainments and others at the Eastern Arcade show that the life of the surrounding streets entered the once-imagined refined confines of the building and may have contributed (along with larrikins, phrenologists, fortune tellers, theatre connections, and murders) to its poor reputation from the 1890s to 1920s.

Grand Arcade (second from corner at left), c1889. Photographer unknown. State Library Queensland, Negative: 100723

Heading north to Brisbane, Henry Morwitch’s Grand Arcade, which seemed to have a regular program of public events, hosting ‘a variety of entertainments and amusements on offer ranging from carnivalesque to the refined’. [6] In 1889, it featured a sideshow-type performer, Fedor Jeftichew, who experienced hypertrichosis, leading to excess body hair, billed as ‘Jo-Jo the Russian dog-faced boy‘. Demonstrating the transnational movements of so many of these entertainers across the globe, Russia-born Jeftichew toured England, Europe and Australia, originally with US showman and circus owner, PT Barnum, who satisfied the public appetite for shows featuring those advertised as ‘monsters’.

Shows that incorporated or featured new technologies also took place in the Grand, including Woodroffe’s glass-blowing exhibition in 1889. Born in the US, Charles Woodroffe exhibited in the States before coming to Australian in the 1860s under the patronage of entertainment entrepreneur George Coppin. Woodroffe’s shows featured glass-blowing combined with technologies such as steam engines made from glass. These shows were popular travelling entertainments and we see Woodroffe exhibiting throughout Australia, as well as presenting his more scientific glass aparatus at international exhibitions. The glassblowing shows were part informative and part show and, as Rebecca C Hopman tells us, ‘delight[ed] spectators with lampworking displays, fabulous models, and tables crowded with glass trinkets’. [7] In 1897 and 1898, new technology again featured, when Lumiére’s cinematograph of moving pictures was exhibited, producing images of the Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and the Melbourne Cup, as well as ‘other exciting events’.

Description of Charles Woodroffe’s show in Maryborough, Queensland. Maryborough Chronicle, 30 August 1887, 2.
Poster for Woodroffe’s brother’s show in Utica New York, 1881. Rakow Research Library Special Collections, Corning Museum of Glass, Flat Files (Unit 31, Drawer 6)

Like those in Melbourne and Brisbane, Sydney’s arcades also hosted a variety of similar amusements. From October 1893 to around December 1894, the basement of the Strand Arcade played host to the Crystal Maze Palace of Amusement, in the Strand Arcade basement. The newspapers tell us that it included entertainments such as ‘Madame Paula, the scientific palmist’, a mirror maze, and mechanical novelties, gaining ‘a large measure of popularity as a holiday resort‘. The next year the arcade had a model of the Tower of London made entirely of cork (one million pieces!), and from 1896 to 1897, Sawyer’s Australian Waxworks, featuring celebrities of the day such as Sarah Bernhardt. These exhibits attained popularity in the nineteenth-century with contemporary and historical personalities rendered in wax, arguably the most famous today being Madame Tussauds, with branches all over the world (including Sydney). Waxworks seems to have tried to attract broad audiences, being advertised in numerous newspapers, including the Guang yi hua bao/The Chinese Australian Herald.

While these are just a snippet of the types of ‘cheap amusements’ that could be found in the Australian arcades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they demonstrate the diversity of the types of entertainments that were available. Their presence indicates that arcades were not just sites that would attract the town elites but had a wider class of visitor. While the Eastern Arcade spatially was embedded in Melbourne’s entertainment district, the Strand was in a more apparently refined location on Pitt Street, in the shopping heart of Sydney, although relatively close to the theatre district on King Street. The presence of such amusements widen our understanding not only of the types of businesses found within arcades but also their visitors, breaking down the idea that these buildings were only the preserve of middle-class or elite shoppers and tea-drinkers.

At the same time, these examples also give insight into the global exchanges that took place in the arcades beyond those of commodities. These travelling entertainers often hailed from North America, Europe or Britain, and elsewhere across the the globe, and travelled independently or as part of troupes, sometimes managed by entertainment entrepreneurs such as Coppin or Barnum. They utilised a variety of genres and techniques, including music and dance, as well as technologies driven by steam and electricity [8], wax modelling, and glassblowing in order to amuse and delight their audiences within the arcades.

Learn more

On 31 October 2023, Dr Alexandra Roginski, a fellow Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas) member, and Professor Andrew Singleton from Deakin University are presenting ‘An Evening of Mystery in the Eastern Arcade: Phrenologists & Spiritualists’ at the Victorian Archives Centre and online. It should be a great talk, so book via Eventbrite! I’m so looking forward to it!

Footnotes

  1. James Lesh, ‘Cremorne Gardens, Gold-rush Melbourne, and the Victorian-era Pleasure Garden, 1853-63’, Victorian Historical Journal 90.2 (2019): 219–252. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/INFORMIT.893493942124131.  
  2. Nicole Davis, Nineteenth-century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage & Representation (PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne, 2023), 165.
  3. Ibid. 186.
  4. Alexandra Roginski, Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge, 2022), in which she talks about the Eastern Arcade.
  5. Hugh Buggy, The Real John Wren (Widescope International, 1977), quoted in Otto, Capital, 47–48.
  6. Davis, ‘Nineteenth-century Arcades in Australia’, 192.
  7. Rebecca C Hopman, ‘Demonstrations Gain Steam’, Journal of Glass Studies 62 (2020): 281.
  8. See for example: Henry Reese, ‘”The World Wanderings of a Voice”: Exhibiting the Cylinder Phonograph in Australasia’, in A Cultural History of Sound, Memory, and the Senses, edited by Joy Damousi & Paula Hamilton (Routledge, 2017)

Other Sources & Further Reading

Mimi Colligan, Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments. inNineteenth-Century Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne University Press, 2002).

Corning Museum of Glass, ‘The Grand Bohemian Troupe of Fancy Glass Workers|Behind the Glass Lecture’, 19 January 2019. YouTube.

Clay Djubal, ‘What Oh Tonight: The Methodology Factor and Pre-1930s’ Australian Variety Theatre (with Special Focus on the One Act Musical Comedy, 1914–1920)’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 2005).

Harry Gordon, ‘Buggy, Edward Hugh (1896–1974)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography.  

Andrew May, ‘Bourke Street’, eMelbourne: The City Past and Present.

Official Record Containing Introduction, History of Exhibition, Description of Exhibition and Exhibits, Official Awards of Commissioners and Catalogue of Exhibits. (Melbourne: Mason, Firth & McCutcheon, 1882), 434, 648.

Kristin Otto, Capital: Melbourne When it Was the Capital City of Australia, 1901–27 (Text Publishing, 2009), 47–75.

Henry Reese, ‘Spectacular Entertainments at Edison Lane’ (parts one and two), State Library of Queensland Blog, 20 December 2022.

Henry Reese, ‘Settler Colonial Soundscapes: Phonograph Demonstrations in 1890s Australia’, in Phonographic Encounters: Mapping Transnational Cultures of Sound, 1890–1945, edited by Elodie A Roy and Eva Moreda Rodriguez (Routledge, 2022), 60–77.

‘The Great Exhibition, 1851: Philosophical instruments by Deleuil 1851’ [photograph], Claude-Marie Ferrier, RCIN 2800038, Royal Collection Trust.  

Richard Waterhouse, ‘The Internationalisation of American Popular Culture in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Minstrel Show’ Australasian Journal of American Studies 4.1 (1985): 1–11.

Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Shows to Vaudeville: the Australian Popular Stage 1788–1914 (NSW University Press, 1990)

Richard Waterhouse, Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788 (Longman, 2005).

Alexa Wright, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2013), 84–85.

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In October last year, along with other members of the Melbourne History Workshop (MHW), I presented at a public seminar, ‘Untimely Ends: Using Inquests for Family and Local History‘, at Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), which focused on a specific collection of documents at PROV. We looked at the broader details of information you can find in these Inquests (Series VPRS 24) and how to use them in historical research. You can find more information on the MHW website, including the PowerPoint of the talk, which is full of useful material.

For my specific section, I talked about some research that I have been doing on Fong Fat, the Chinese owner of several Fancy Goods stores: two on Swanston Street and one in the Eastern Arcade in the 1860s and 1870s (although not all at the same time). The inquests research revealed more about his story but, more significantly, gave some greater detail about the women in his family: his daughter, Ah Chow; his first wife, Chinese-born Quinti; and his second wife, English immigrant Catherine Downey, formerly the family’s housekeeper and shop assistant.

In the last post on Fong Fat, I wrote about English-born New Zealander Charles Rooking Carter‘s comment on the shopping opportunities in the city of Melbourne in 1869:

he could find only one handsome Chinese shop in all Melbourne, and that was kept by ‘celestial’ individual rejoicing in the name of Fong Fat. He indeed, had an excellent display of Chinese fancy goods, in the way of carved ivory work, ebony work, porcelain baskets — besides tea and tobacco.

Carter, Victoria: The British ‘El Dorado‘ (1870)

Fong Fat’s shop, at 96 Swanston Street, near Little Bourke, was joined by another at 48 Bourke Street, in 1871 and then by another, in 1872, in the new and prestigious Eastern Arcade on Bourke Street. It was this shop that led me to Fong Fat and his story. In my research work on nineteenth-century Australian shopping arcades I came across advertisements for the wares that Fong Fat sold in the arcade, including imported Chinese homewares, bric-a-brac, fireworks, tea, and tobacco.

Advertisement for Fong Fat’s Eastern Arcade store, Herald, 20 December 1872, 4

While we imagine arcades in this period, and indeed Melbourne itself, as rather heterogenous and white, Chinese, Indian, Afghani and other non-European shops appeared in them to satisfy the taste for, to European eyes, exotic products from these regions. These shops and the stories of their proprietors demonstrate that Australia and its urban centres were more cosmopolitan that we often imagine.

The image we often have of the Chinese in Australia is of goldfields immigrants, sojourners that return or intend to return to China after making their money, who send their profits home, and whose Chinese wives that are left behind with the extended family. But, as scholars of the Chinese-Australian experience such as Sophie Loy-Wilson and Kate Bagnall, have explored, the story is far more complex. Many also decided to remain in Australia, becoming an integral part of Australian urban and regional life.

Fong Fat’s life is a one of those that little different to the Chinese sojourner trope, as is that of his family. Born in Canton around 1820, he came to Australia about 1857, presumably for gold, and established himself as a shopkeeper. He died in Stawell in 1884 after having married English-born widow Catherine Downey in 1872. This aspect of his story is really interesting, although not so highly unusual for Chinese-Australian men of the period; quite high numbers began relationships and had children with non-Chinese women. What intrigued me even more though was the story of his first family.

As I searched through Trove, as you do, for newspaper reports on him, I found some intriguing articles about two inquests in which he gave evidence. The first was that of four-month-old Ah Chow, the child of Fong Fat, who died in 1865 of inflammation of the lungs. The second, was that of his Chinese wife Quinti whose death, five years later, was caused by a stroke, and the newspapers claimed was probably the first inquest on a Chinese woman in the Australian colonies. These stories really intrigued me because our general story is that almost no Chinese women were present in Australia during this period. The Victorian census records indicate that there were eight Chinese women in 1861 (although 7% of the total population was China born), which grew to 31 in 1871. But there were a very very small number, of which Quinti was one .

Report on the inquest of Ah Chow, The Age, 10 July 1865, 4
Report on the inquest of Quinti, The Age, 17 May 1870, 3. The report mentions Catherine Downey, who was soon to become Fong Fat’s second wife

Interested in finding more, I obtained the inquest records (now almost all digitised!) from PROV, which told us a little more about the findings of the coroner, although the majority of the information was really quite well reported in the newspapers. But the inquests help to personalise this much more as we read the words of Fong Fat’s testimony for both his little daughter’s and wife’s deaths (the second was given through a translator). Like many testimonies, they seem dry, but we can imagine the probable distress of the father and husband at these events. Of Ah Chow’s death he stated:

The deceased female infant Ah Chow was my child. She was 28 days old. She was healthy up to the day before yesterday. She was in bed with her mother when I went home at 12 o’clock at night. My wife was crying. I saw blood coming from the child’s mouth. I went for a doctor but he was not at home. The child was alive then but lived only two hours.

Inquest deposition of Fong Fat in the death of his daughter Ah Chow. Public Records Office Victoria, VPRS 24 P0000 Unit 167, 4

The inquests are also interesting as they not only have testimonies from Fong Fat but also non-Chinese associates. This includes, in the inquest of Quinti, their housekeeper and shop assistant in Fong Fat’s store, Catherine Downey. Name sound familiar? Yes, this is the English-born widow that he married in 1871 and was his wife until her death fifteen years later!

I approach the history of urban Australia often in through the avenues of family history such as this. Using the personal stories of individual personalities to tell bigger histories and revealing larger events, such as the goldrush and its aftermath, Chinese migration to Australia, and the history of the city. Someone like Fong Fat, making his way in a city we often envisage as European and the presence of his Chinese wife and child, gives a different complexion to our imagination of Australia during the period.

Once I had found the inquests, I sourced as many other documents as I could to build a picture of these people and their lives – more newspaper reports, including advertising for the shops, stories about a court case Fong Fat’s second wife brought against someone, records of Catherine’s burial in the Melbourne General Cemetery and the gold that is the death certificates of Ah Chow and Quinti, which told us a little about them. Quinti, we find was born in Canton in around 1846 and had come to Victoria in around 1864 or 5, presumably to be a wife to Fong Fat. She quickly bore her only child, Ah Chow, in the colony, only to lose her, and then to die herself five years later.

The inquests themselves are only suggestive of what life would be like for Chinese women in Australia. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of detail in these particular ones but … in many other inquests we would receive a wealth of other detail about individuals. The death certificates reveal a little more, but they add to the story we are building. Importantly to me they also disrupt the idea that Chinese women were not present in Australia at all and the trope of the single sojourner Chinese man.

I think they also put a human slant on the often racialised and sensationalised newspaper reports about the Chinese community in the colonial city.  Together with all these other documents, the inquests provide another window into the lives of Fong Fat, Quinti and their baby daughter, as well as his second wife, and show how these types of records can provide more detailed information and illuminate the stories of Australian families.

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I could find only one handsome Chinese shop in all Melbourne, and that was kept by a ‘celestial’ individual rejoicing in the name of Fong Fat. He indeed, had an excellent display of Chinese fancy goods, in the way of carved ivory work, ebony work, porcelain baskets — besides tea and tobacco. (Carter 1870, 54).

Eastern Arcade
View of the Eastern Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne, 1877. Photographer: NJ Caire. State Library Victoria, H84.3/11.

In 1873, four businesses in the Eastern Arcade, Bourke Street, Melbourne, were listed as fancy goods dealers. Popular in arcades and in locations on the city streets, fancy goods stores had a wide variety of products for the home and personal use.

One of these was occupied by Chinese merchant and importer, Fong Fat, whose store occupied two shopfronts – numbers 11 and 13 – but his fancy goods were a little different to many of the products to be found in similar stores in colonial Melbourne and, indeed, in the Eastern Arcade.

Fong Fat was already well-established in the city as a fancy goods dealer, having run such a business at 98 Swanston Street since July 1868 (Herald, 18 July 1868, 1), before opening this second branch in the ostensibly prestigious location of the Eastern Arcade, in December 1872 (Argus, 18 December 1872, 2).

Screen Shot 2018-11-01 at 7.56.22 pm
Advertisement for Fong Fat’s Fancy Goods at 98 Swanston Street, Herald, 18 July 1868, 1.

In his stores, he carried Chinese (and some Japanese) products, including manufactured goods, such as carved ivory and ebony ware, porcelain crockery, silk and cotton, dress trimmings, fans, workboxes, tea caddies firecrackers, baskets, slippers, bamboo blinds and fishing rods, Japanese toothpowder, and Chinese crackers, but also consumables such as tea, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and spices.

Advertising indicates that he utilised connections in mainland China to import these treasures himself, for ‘All kinds of Chinese fancy goods [were] imported by Fong Fat direct from Canton … [including] chinaware, direct from the celebrated house of Messrs. Bow Hing and Co.’ for his Swanston Street store (Herald, 18 July 1868, 1). Later ‘he obtained all the newest novelties in China goods expressly for’ his new store in the arcade in 1872 (Argus, 18 December 1872, 2).

We gain an idea of what some of these goods may have looked like by taking a glance some of the imported Chinese items in the collection of Museums Victoria, including an ivory fan box, a silk and ivory fan, and a carved bone fan. Although these objects are of a slightly later date (1880), they perhaps represent some of what customers might be able to buy in Fong Fat’s shops.

Fan – Carved Bone, China, c1880. Museums Victoria, HT 22652. https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1453444
Fan – Silk & Ivory, China, Late Qing Dynasty, c1880. Museums Victoria, HT 22651.

 

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Fan Box – Ivory, Carved Village Scenes, China, late Qing Dynasty, c1880. Museums Victoria, HT 22577.

The presence of a Chinese shopkeeper in a shopping arcade, a space that is perhaps imagined as a white, elite zone of occupation and leisure, may seem unusual, but such goods fed the desire for ‘Oriental’ and exotic goods in demand in Britain and Europe. But they were also desired, and available, in regional and metropolitan Australia during the latter half of the nineteenth century into the twentieth (e.g., Loy-Wilson 2014, 2017).

We can see from newspaper advertising that a surprising number of shops and businesses in the Australian arcades captured the Orientalist desires of the consumer in the settler colonial landscape. These included importers of Japanese and Chinese silks, furniture and other wares, Indian and Chinese tea shops, Oriental Bazaars, Turkish baths, and more. Many, but not all, were owned and run by non-British or European Australians like Fong Fat.

Fong Fat only lasted a year in the Eastern Arcade, vacating when his lease ran out at the end of 1873. The last we hear of him, as a fancy goods seller at least, is at his Swanston Street store in December 1874.

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Swanston Street, 1872. Photographer unknown. State Library Victoria, H96.160/1721. Fong Fat’s store was four doors down from the Star Hotel, and is possibly that indicated with the arrow.

Who was Fong Fat and what happened to him after this last mention? Is he the man of the same name running a Chinese lottery and gambling den in Little Collins Street in 1875 (Weekly Times, 10 July 1875, 11)? Is he the Fong Fat who was fined for creating noxious gas in 1876 from his opium refinery? (PROV, VPRS 3181/PO/660/473)? Is he the Fong Fatee that appears with his wife on the Melbourne stage in the 1880s? Do we see him donating fruit and tea to the hospital fete committee in Hay, New South Wales, in 1893?

I’m asking these and other questions during the next few weeks, as I try to piece his story together. I have found some interesting information about his personal life already, gleaned from court records, newspapers, inquests, and other documents that I’ve been scouring. In Part Two of this post I’ll talk more about Font Fat’s Chinese wife, Quinti, and their daughter, Ah Chow, as well as his shop assistant, who was later his wife, Catherine Downey.

Select Bibliography

Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 3181 [Melbourne City Council] Town Clerk’s Files, Series I

Charles Rooking Carter, Victoria, the British ‘El Dorado’: Or: Melbourne in 1869 (London: Edward Stanford, 1870)

Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Rural Geographies and Chinese Empires: Chinese Shopkeepers and Shop-Life in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 45.3 (2014): 407–424.

Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (London & New York: Routledge, 2017)

Allom Lovell & Associates, The Royal Arcade: Conservation Management Plan (Melbourne: Allom Lovell &​ Associates, 1995)

Barbara Salisbury, The Strand Arcade: A History (Marrickville: Southwood Press, 1990)

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Queens Arcade Melbourne
Queen’s Arcade, Melbourne, Interior. St Gill, 1856. State Library Victoria

I know I’ve been very very quiet lately! I actually have lots of prepped posts but have been super busy over the last six months madly writing my thesis plus conference papers plus journal articles (this is good!). Today I’m writing Chapter Two and came across just the best advertisement for the Queen’s Arcade, placed in the newspaper in its opening days in October 1853.

Nineteenth-century newspaper advertisements were often entertaining and appealed to the reader through a variety of methods, including in this case … rhyme. It shows that the arcade’s owners, a consortium of well-off middle-class Melbourne businessmen, aimed provide a the wide variety and mix of tenants and produce for the consumer who visited.

Much like today’s modern shopping mall, everything shoppers desired could be found at the arcade – clothing and accessories, fabrics jewellery, musical wares, art materials, luxury consumables and onsite refreshment rooms. This gave them (ideally) no cause to go elsewhere, and the diversity and variety available seemed to place the new novelty of the arcade in an ideal position to become the centre of shopping and social life in Melbourne.

THE QUEEN’S ARCADE.

THE Belles and Beaux of Melbourne’s Town to aid,
What can be better than the Queen’s Arcade for
A pleasant lounge in summer’s sultry days,
Well shelter’d from old Sol’s o’powering rays;
And when the hot winds drive dust helter skelter
What place than this more cool and fit for shelter?
When the wet season makes our town a swamp.
The Queen’s Arcade is dry and free from damp;
And here the Melbourne belles may walk at ease,
And choose what rare commodities they please.
I’ll run them over with your kind permission
First, we’ve G. Goldsmith’s Bonnet Exhibition,
To suit complexions whether dark or fair;
Jewels and ornaments, both rich and rare;
Scents of all kinds, exquisite and recherche,
With papier mache, too, and gutta percha;
Drapery, hosiery, splendid silks, and satin,
With books in English, French, German, and Latin.
“Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast,”
And fewer bosoms. Here you’ll find the best
Quadrilles by Jullien, D’Albert’s waltzes fast,
The Arcade Polka, Winterbottoms’s last,
Bijouterie and articles of dress
On your attention, ladies, let me press,
That everything for widow, wife, or maid,
Is to be met with in the Queen’s Arcade;
And if the ladies’ smiles we only win,
Of course the gentlemen will soon drop In,
And they will find that them we’ve not forgot,
Havannahs and cheroots, a splendid lot,
With meerschaums, cutties, snuffs of every kind,
In short, all tastes will here be pleased; you’ll find
Rings, watches, pins, and studs in rich array.
Coats, trousers, vests of patterns neat or gay,
Canes, riding whips, and boots of patent leather,
With Mackintoshes to resist the weather.
To sum up all, an Universal Mart,
We mean to be a Gallery of Art,
And every exertion will be made
To please the public, in the Queen’s Arcade.
Refreshments of the best and choicest kind.
Will also be provided; you will find
Confectionery, pastry, jellies, ice,
Crackers, bon-bons, and everything that’s nice;
And taste it once, you’ll say such lemonade
You never drank but in the Queen’s Arcade.

The Banner, Melbourne, 7 October 1853 (via Trove)

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Being a researcher of any sort takes a large degree of doggedness, obsessiveness, and lots of eye strain. From scientists to historians, professionals, and amateur enthusiasts, anyone who researches has experienced this. We also understand the need to go over our material again and again, looking for new angles and evidence.

SLV H332 Gill The Block
Doing the Block, Melbourne. ST Gill, 1880. State Library Victoria.

So my quest to explore the history of Australia’s shopping arcades. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve trawled through Trove, Google Images, library websites, and books looking for images of these buildings. In addition to that, I’ve looked through hundreds of dusty old archival files, maps and plans that I’m terrified will crumble in my hand, astonishing but delicate and hard-to-see 100-year-old glass plate negatives and the most unsexy and eye-killing of research tools – the microfilm. Every time this was in pursuit of myriad tiny bits of information that a historian pieces together to tell as coherent a story as possible about their subjects.

But I also really really want to find some photos – because they are of course half the story and what helps bring to life these stories for your readers. Being an urban historian, this has often involved scouring street scenes of numerous Australian towns to hope that you’ll finally catch a glimpse of that building that you know existed but no-one thought it worth keeping an image of, or it hasn’t been tagged in digital files in order for you to find.

As an urban historian and curator first starting out, I spent probably over 100 hours looking at street scenes of Sydney for the Sydney’s pubs exhibition, trying to find elusive pubs that no-one knew about. I had eureka moments, when I spotted the Imperial Hotel on Wynyard Park, and crashing defeats in others, such as the Blue Anchor on George Street. Nine years later I still find myself looking for ones that escaped me, or getting excited about new images of those I already had found (that’s the obsession part!).

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Wynyard Square, Sydney. 1879. State Library New South Wales.

Now I’m back to scouring for this project. Realistically, most of the Australian arcades I’m researching have exterior images that are relatively easy to find. Interior images decidedly less so. For the last few years I’ve been searching for images of the first arcade built in Australia, the Queens Arcade, built on Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, in 1853. And believe me I’ve looked. I feel like I can see the changing urban portrait of Lonsdale Street from the 1850s to the 1890s in my mind like a palimpsest over today’s streetscape. But I had very little success in finding any image of any part of the building. The camera was always facing not quite the right way or the photo I found was of the site after the arcade had been demolished. And definitely no interior was to be found.

The first breakthrough was when I was trawling the internet yet again and found an old illustration in an old lecture Powerpoint that eminent urbanist Miles Lewis had put online. The Illustrated Melbourne Post is one of those rare newspapers that hasn’t been put online and you need to go to and find it in the State Library of Victoria on a microfilm ‘in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the Leopard”‘ (Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979).

Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 29 October 1853, p4.
Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Illustrated Melbourne Post, 29 October 1853, 4

But frustratingly, I could never find anything else. Until the other day. I just decided to randomly look on the State Library of Victoria’s site again and up popped a new image of the interior of an arcade from 1856 – the Queen’s Arcade. The image shows its curved corrugated iron roof (one of the first galvanised iron structures made locally in Melbourne) as well as the lighting, which was achieved using clerestory windows rather than a glass ceiling. This was a simple interpretation of the arcade form, inspired by European examples but built using local materials.

Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Interior. St Gill, 1856. State Library Victoria
Queens Arcade, Melbourne, Interior. ST Gill, 1856. State Library Victoria.

Additionally the description of this item mentioned another image – a panorama of Little Collins Street by Melbourne photographer Charles Nettleton – that also shows the arcade from its back entry at far right. I may have looked at this photograph before but never picked up on the arcade being in it – it also didn’t come up in searches, as the description is not labelled it with the name of the arcade. Here you can see clearer the curved roof and clerestory windows, as well as the rather ornate back entrance on Little Bourke Street.

SLV H23929 Bourke Street Looking NE
Bourke Street Looking NE. Charles Nettleton, 1860. State Library Victoria.

SLV H23929 Bourke Street Looking NE detail
Bourke Street Looking NE (detail). Charles Nettleton, 1860. State Library Victoria.

The image of the interior was by celebrate illustrator ST Gill, who captured the life and rhythm of mid- to late nineteenth-century Melbourne and Ballarat. Currently the library is hosting a fantastic exhibition of Gill’s work, which I’ve lately found to be one of the visual inspirations for my thesis in the way it brings to life the city streets and their inhabitants. The Gill drawing probably went up online as part of the library’s research for the exhibition and my finding of it shows that its worth (re)searching again and again for images (and other historical information), as institutions like the library are always working on new exhibitions and research and, therefore, putting up new digitised images and other information for us to discover.

Addendum: ST Gill also drew this illustration of Melbourne’s second arcade, the 1854 Victoria Arcade, which doesn’t have appeared to have lasted long and may have never really got off the ground.

Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street Melbourne. ST Gill for JS Campbell & Co, Lithographers, 1853. State Library Victoria
Victoria Arcade, Bourke Street Melbourne. ST Gill for JS Campbell & Co, Lithographers, 1853. State Library Victoria

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On 8 March it was International Women’s Day and the AFL kicked off with the NAB Cup … In honour of these, a bit of trivia:

In 1911 & 1912 both suffragist Vida Goldstein & the Victorian Football League had offices in the Block Arcade Melbourne. You can find information about these and many other tenants of buildings throughout the state in the Sands & McDougall Directory of Victoria at the State Library of Victoria.

The Argus, 25 April, 1912, p5. Accessed on Trove at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11670383
The Argus, 25 April, 1912, p5. Accessed on Trove at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11670383