Can Lonsdale Street Still Be Considered The Greek Precinct Of Melbourne?

Not discounting time spent in Canberra or interstate, I worked for almost twenty seven years at the eastern end of Lonsdale Street, about two city blocks away from what we call the Greek Precinct of Melbourne.

For those not aware, it is mostly the southern stretch of Lonsdale Street between Swanston and Russell, opposite QV. There is a Greek community HQ diagonally opposite on the north east corner of Russell and Lonsdale, and there is a Greek travel agency upstairs in an adjacent laneway. Apparently, back in the 1970s, the Greek Precinct extended around the corner into both Russell and Swanston, as far as Little Bourke.

I don’t really remember that far back – the city was, until I started working there, just a place for school holiday excursions to the Cinemas (we did not have suburban multiplexes then) or for some specified purpose. I was not really familiar with much then except where the major cinemas were vaguely located (all gone!) and where to find the bus stops to get home to Footscray.

My intimate knowledge of what we now call the Hoddle Grid did not really start til I started working in an office in early 1991, and even then it was several years til I really got to know much else of town – including not really getting to know Chinatown in those early days.

From 1996 onward, when I started working in Lonsdale Street, I was a regular in the Greek precinct, where there were at least half a dozen restaurants to choose between, ranging from ones where you could settle in with a bottle or two of red for a very happy meal, right down to where you could grab a quick souvlaki after a Friday night at the pub.

Some very happy memories of dinners at Stalactites in the mid 1990s with a couple of friends, til I discovered that the eggplant dip at Tsindos was way better (I have a thing for eggplant dip).

And I still chuckle as I remember a boozy work Christmas lunch in December 2002 at Antipodes (a sadly short lived but very pleasant Greek restaurant), when one rather Karen-like colleague drank past her tolerance levels and had to be taxied home by another colleague who was going in that direction. Apparently there was a huge mess in the Ladies’ bathroom.

For a brief while circa 2000, there even was a Greek restaurant on the north side, in the QV development, not long after it opened.

But, as I mournfully observed in this blog last November, International Cakes had closed, leaving two restaurants bookending what was left of the precinct. Bit by bit, particularly over the past 15 years or so, each of the restaurants had closed, replaced by either upmarket bars or Asian cuisine.

Yesterday, I was en route to the Exford Hotel in Russell Street to meet a friend (we were going to go to the Wallabies Vs British Lions Rugby Union Test at the MCG) when I happened to notice that Tsindos was closed.

So I googled it and saw a notice that they had gone into administration in April and have permanently closed down, having been a fixture of the Greek Precinct since 1973.

This makes me quite sad. Tsindos is a place which held many happy memories for me, since I became a regular there in late 1999, quite aside from the amazing eggplant dip.

And its closure has other significance. The Greek presence in that part of Lonsdale Street is now down to a souvenir shop and Stalactites, which has also been there since the 1970s.

Can two businesses constitute a precinct anymore?

I call it with great reluctance – the Lonsdale Street Greek Precinct is now dead, having slowly died over the past decade and a half.

The only positive is that we still have the Eaton Mall in Oakleigh, where I regularly meet some former colleagues for dinner, but which is quite a long hike from my pocket of the Western Suburbs. That is a thriving al fresco dining atmosphere, with at least eight separate businesses extending down the street, some occupying shop fronts on both sides of the street.

But regardless of the Eaton Mall’s existence, it is sad that something which has been such a great part of central Melbourne’s cultural and cuisine offerings for such a long time is now gone.

Bilton School, Rugby – An Infestation Of Treasonous Karens

One of my quirks is that I sometimes self-identify as British, despite my ethnic origins being Italian and having never actually visited the UK.

The basis for this is that until late 1985 when the Australian Citizenship Act was amended, all Australian Citizens were automatically considered British Subjects.

As I never consented to give up that status, I insist on calling myself British.

Hence, as a proud Briton, I got extremely angry when the news broke this week that a 12 year old student, wearing a Ginger Spice inspired Union Jack dress, was prevented from participating in her school’s diversity day.

Here are some of the links:

https://www.warwickshireworld.com/news/people/bilton-school-offers-further-apology-to-the-wider-rugby-community-following-union-flag-dress-controversy-5229212

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7vrgdpllyyo

I am not the only one being angry about this matter – although I suspect the algorithm on Facebook is acting like an echo chamber to amplify my feed.

There is a campaign on social media demanding the sacking of Jayne Delves, the headmistress of this school.

Online images of her suggest that she bears a resemblance to your garden variety Karen. I say that she is much worse than any garden variety Karen, and that she has engaged in anti-patriotic conduct which borders on treason, and that this should be tested with a trial in an English court.

I also suggest, and only half tongue in cheek, that a medieval punishment for treason, which some might call highly barbaric, might be in order in this situation if she is found guilty.

Alternatively, perhaps the Westminster Parliament, font of all global sovereignty (yes I am rather jingoistic), might pass a Bill of Attainder and punish her accordingly.

The Slow Death Of The News Agency

I regularly take the bus route that runs past my street to Highpoint West, so I know a lot of the other frequent bus passengers.

One is an elderly chap who is always friendly and chatty, and who has lived in Avondale Heights his whole life (ie since the early 1950s). He knows a lot of local history that I find interesting – such as when there was just one bus running between Keilor East and Footscray over the wonky old bridge, and that the bus driver would be sipping from a tall beer bottle on the job.

He also said that the only shop in Military Road was the one which is now a news agency, but which at the time was the General Store.

When I moved into this area in March 2003, there were still some hints that the news agency used to be something more – there was a table of books for sale for $2 each. Those were all HSC/VCE English texts, presumably left over from when the shop used to stock text books for the local high school. I picked up some bargains – The Great Gatsby, various Shakespeare plays, and a number of the sort of books which are more obscure but beloved of the cabal of high school English teachers.

That news agency has changed since then. It mostly now stocks a few magazines, hardly any newspapers, some stationary, and a lot of giftware. Most of the business now consists of selling lottery tickets. [They don’t even act as a dry cleaning agency anymore, which is a damned nuisance as I now need to haul my jackets to Ascot Vale.]

That former news agency is not the only one transforming. Earlier this week, I wandered into the news agency at Highpoint West, looking to buy the latest Phantom comic (the 2000th edition by Frew publications actually), and saw that workmen were busy out the back. The shop was being reduced in size.

This is not the first time that shop has been reduced in size – during the COVID it moved from another nearby location in the shopping centre where it was significantly bigger.

Which I suppose is unsurprising. We do not read physical newspapers as much anymore (if I am going to lunch at the Savage Club, I will browse all four major papers in the Social Room whilst waiting for my guests to show up but otherwise I rarely read the paper anymore). Nor do print magazines do particularly well anymore.

Most of the business news agencies now do seems to be lottery tickets. That is even more pronounced at the Milleara Shopping Centre, where the lottery agency sells a few newspapers, but there is a giant queue of ticket buyers just before each big lottery jackpot.

I guess that is just the way things are going. Just like the suburban milk bar has either died out completely or morphed into something which relies on tobacco sales to keep its doors open.

But I don’t have to like it.

What To Do About Nuisance Calls

A couple of months ago, I decided to record my mobile number on the DO NOT CALL register through the ACMA website. This is not the first time I had recorded my number on this service, but as it was several years (sometime before COVID I think), I felt that it was probably wise to try and make sure that my phone number was currently recorded.

After all, I have been getting lots of rather annoying calls from marketers for all sorts of matters.

Like, for example, the Solar Panel business whom rang me as a cold call last October and who then did a very inadequate job of follow up on getting my meter reconfigured (I finally got it sorted out 5 months after they installed the panels).

Or before that, early last year when I got repeated cold calls day after day from a business which was offering to clean my heater. They did not understand (or listen properly) when I explained that I then had a space heater rather than a ducted heater and sent someone who did not know how to clean space heaters.

Moral of the story is that answering cold calls and actually agreeing to become a customer of those businesses something you are going to regret.

But those calls are just by the by.

Recently, I have started getting cold calls which then have a recorded voice say’ goodbye’ before hanging up, or other cold calls who hang up without hanging up.

Very annoying.

So… being both a grumpy late middle aged man and the retired middle ranking bureaucrat that I am, I have decided to take steps about this using the skills I acquired from 33 years of employment in the Federal Government.

First step is to start making records. I started an excel spreadsheet a week and a half ago, on which I am recording dates, times, phone numbers, and details of the calls. So far, I already have five calls recorded in a ten day period.

The next step, once I have enough data, is to lodge a complaint with the appropriate section in the ACMA.

I am not planning to leave it at that. I will be publishing those phone numbers on this blog once I get enough data to make it worth the effort. As well as that, I will be updating progress on whether ACMA take action and what sort of sanctions might occur – assuming that Federal Privacy Laws (which were amended to become rather obtuse in 2012) allow the ACMA to provide such updates.

Forgetting Tom Clancy

You see lots of crazy stuff on social media. My Facebook feed (and I am a relative newcomer to FB) alternates between regaling me with AI generated stories of family conflict which approach Greek tragedy in their proportions (who would have thought spending one kid’s college fund on another or wearing white to your stepsister’s wedding was such a common cause of drama?!?) and some very very politically incorrect memes and videos (the nicest one is an AI generated Bigfoot working as a barrista who throws some woke hipster through a window for using they/their as her pronouns).

I was on Google+ for six years, til it closed down in early 2019, precipitating my creation of this blog. Whilst, probably due to the lack of deep fake AI video and AI generated drama stories, it was not as puerile as what I waste my time doom scrolling on Facebook, some of the real authentic content generated by my fellow ‘Plussers’ was pretty bizarre.

One fellow who sticks out was on a mission, according to his G+ profile, to ‘return America to God’. He once asked people on our G+ community (I think I was on an American Conservative community) what sort of Bible was acceptable to read. You see, a preacher in the Deep South (whence he came) had warned people over the radio that if they read anything except the King James Version, then they would go to Hell….

And we claim that Forrest Gump is a fictional character.

This fellow also reacted rather weirdly to the death of popular American techno-thriller writer Tom Clancy, he of late Cold War classics like The Hunt For Red October and The Cardinal Of The Kremlin. Tom Clancy was in his late 60s, and died of complications from a heart condition. Or so we have been told. This KJV Bible thumper did not believe this. Obviously Tom Clancy was too young and too rich from his books and movie rights to die of natural causes before reaching his 90s. Ergo he had been murdered, either by the US Government or other sinister forces, because ‘he knew too much’.

[Really, I need to rejoin MeWe, where the really crazy people post online.]

Which is as good a place as any to reflect on Tom Clancy. I first was exposed to his writings through the great thriller film of Red October starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin circa 1989, followed by Patriot Games, which starred Harrison Ford. Soon after in September 1992, I acquired a copy of Clear And Present Danger in a giveaway from a bookstore in the CBD when I bought some other book. That more or less hooked me, and by August 1994 I had devoured the rest of the Jack Ryan novels to the point where I bought Debt Of Honour in hardback.

Debt Of Honour is where Tom Clancy started to get a little silly – his protagonist Jack Ryan transforms at this end of this novel from reluctant spy to accidental US President. The next few books cover his challenges as President.

I have occasionally said that if you want to understand the way the average middle class American’s mind works, you need to read Tom Clancy. I expect that Jack Ryan serves as an avatar for Clancy’s own beliefs, which are very much American, particularly on matters like abortion and the death penalty (state’s rights on the first, and generally pro on the second).

Tom Clancy’s views also changed over the course of his literary career. In Patriot Games, which was written in the mid 1980s, one character has to talk Jack Ryan down from killing some terrorists who had just tried to murder his family. The argument is that he needs to avoid vigilante action and trust in the Rule of Law (ie state sponsored executions) to do the job for him. Similarly, in Clear And Present Danger, Jack Ryan is the opponent of illegal black operations against the Columbian cartels sponsored by rogue elements in the NSC and CIA.

Put simply, bad guys deserve to be dead, but you do it within the law, not without some sort of Due Process.

But by the time he got around to writing his sequel series, his views had changed. He started a sequel series featuring a shadow agency supported secretly by Ryan as ex-President, containing a safe full of undated presidential pardons for immunity and funded by insider trading facilitated by the actual intelligence community. This series starred Ryan’s son and nephews as assassins employed to secretly take out terrorists and other enemies of the state.

This late conversion to vigilantism, along with the over the top nature of the latter books, lost me as a fan of Tom Clancy.

I recently dug out the last of my Tom Clancy novels, the hardbacks, from the box in the wardrobe in the back room which doubles as my study, and donated them to the street library in Canning Street. After all, I am not going to read them again, and I might need the room in the wardrobe for something else.

One of them, Executive Orders, is still there after an entire month – that is the one where Communist China and India and a reunified Iran-Iraq conspire to overthrow America. Which got me wondering as to how relevant Tom Clancy, former Cold Warrior, in the post Cold War world?

[Also, why is it the only one to remain, despite being free to take? Is it something to do with the US flag on the jacket in this hyper erratic second Trumpian presidency?]

Clancy was a late comer to Cold War spy literature, and the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he had to transition across after only three novels. Len Deighton never really bothered to keep writing after the end of the Cold War, but he had done all his best work by then. And Frederick Forsythe, for all that his best work was in the 1970s, was able to focus on other issues than the Cold War.

Both however, in keeping the scale of their writings small, rather than grandiose, were able to avoid becoming increasingly preposterous the way that Clancy did. [Note that I don’t mention John LeCarre – I plan to read his Smiley novels now in retirement.]

I also note that only four of the novels got to film adaption – and Sum Of All Fears had to wait years after publication and then had a delayed release due to 9/11. I think that even Hollywood could not suspend disbelief in relation to what Clancy wrote in his later novels.

And thus I farewell Tom Clancy and his novels from my life, and hope that his posthumous ghost writers (I hope not literally) stop producing more utter tosh to clutter shelves in my local bookstore.

On Celebrating Bloomsday In Style

I suppose my first exposure to the writings of James Joyce was similar to that of most other people of my generation, through the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back To School.

In it, the hot English professor played by Annette Kellerman walks into the lecture theatre on the first day and starts reciting from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses:

…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

During it, Rodney Dangerfield starts to get rather excited, and repeats yes as he fantasises himself and the professor together.

Since then, I have actually read most of James Joyce’s writings, particularly Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake, Dubliners, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Remarkably perhaps, I completed this feat by my mid 20s.

All of the action in Ulysses takes place on 16 June 1904, and over the years, devotees of the writings of Joyce have taken to observing that day as Bloomsday, a secular Irish festival (as opposed to St Patrick’s Day, which is a religious Irish festival).

In any event, it being an Irish celebration, it is pretty much an excuse to drink, or so I have been led to believe.

Yesterday was Bloomsday, and this time, for the first time in my life, I actually remembered to celebrate it, something I have been intending to do for several years.

As I am a recently elected member of the Savage Club, I try to attend convivial lunches there. Yesterday, the literati of the Club, who normally discuss poetry or a particular novel together, held their annual Bloomsday lunch, something which they have been holding for over a decade.

And so, instead of showing up at some random Irish pub, I booked myself a seat at the lunch and settled in to enjoy myself.

And it was done in style. Over lunch, with generous refills of the wine glasses (I did start with a Guinness in honour of it being an Irish event), we listened to recitals of passages from Joyce, and to renditions of some of his favourite songs – including Cole Porter’s I Love Paris.

I did ask the chap seated next to me about whether Bloomsday is actually celebrated in Irish pubs the same way St Patrick’s Day is, and he said that they probably do, but that 99% of the people celebrating it would not have read any Joyce, whereas 99% of the people at our luncheon would have read a lot of his work.

I am not planning to discover whether Bloomsday is observed in Irish pubs next year. Instead, I will return to the Savage Club for their next celebration of James Joyce. Much more in keeping with both my interest in literature and with the literary origins of the Savage Club.

Last Train From Mariupol

I have now listened to Flying With Angels, the current and newly released Suzanne Vega several times. That is the benefit of deciding to rediscover the use of a CD player after several years and to start playing the albums of my favourite singers again in full.

There is a song which is quite thought provoking on it, Last Train From Mariupol, which directly addresses Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine in 2022, and which was written shortly afterwards.

As this is a serious issue, I will share the lyrics here:

[Verse 1]
There’s a last train from Mariupol
Mariupol, oh, Mariupol
Last train from Mariupol
See how the platform is heaving

[Verse 2]
Who’s on the train from Mariupol?
Mariupol, Mariupol
Who’s on the train from Mariupol?
All of humanity fleeing

[Verse 3]
I heard God himself was on the last train
Mariupol, Mariupol
God himself was on the last train
Frightened by all he was seeing

[Verse 4]
There’s a last train from Mariupol
Mariupol, Mariupol
Last train from Mariupol
All of humanity grieving

The Devil Take Your Stereo And Your Record Collection!

Frequently, when I talk about music, I am showing my age. The title to this blog is borrowed from Stand and Deliver, an early 80s song from English group Adam and the Ants. They were very big in 1981 – I recall Ant Music spending about 10 weeks on top of the Australian singles chart which was pretty much unprecedented (try doing that Taylor Swift!).

The line just popped into my head last night, even though I have never had any interest in listening to Adam and the Ants in the intervening four decades plus, and don’t own (nor intend to own) any of their recordings in either physical or electronic form.

The catalyst for me thinking about an obscure 1981 hit single was the arrival, on Friday in the mail, of Flying with Angels, Suzanne Vega’s latest album – her first studio album in over a decade.

Streaming means that I very rarely buy any CDs anymore, and nor do I bother playing them. Suzanne Vega, my favourite singer, is an exception to that rule – I just had to have her album in physical form, as with all her other albums, and some of her more obscure song track or tribute recordings (how else would I know about Laura Nyro, a folk singer whom Vega sees as a precursor?).

So last night I did something which is rare for me in recent years – I played some CDs rather than to just simply stream. I unpacked the CD player my cousin bought for me as a gift several years ago, and which had sat unopened and unused for all that time, plugged it in, and worked out how to use it.

Then I played Flying with Angels twice. After that, being in an indulgent mood, I grabbed my copy of Tori Amos’ early (and disavowed) album, Y Kant Tori Read, which I bought for about $150 in the Belconnen Music Shop in 1999 during my seven month sojourn in Canberra, and played that. [OK – it is not as good as Under The Pink or From The Choirgirl Hotel, but Tori Amos did not need to disown it except for the terrible 1980s hairstyle she wore on the cover.]

Then, to finish off the evening, I played a CD of Maeba Mina, a reclusive Italian singer with a cult following – another gift from my cousin.

I found it all more relaxing than streaming, which usually involves me picking out individual songs I like and paying close attention.

So… whilst I don’t own a stereo as such, and my record collection is a story for another day (I inadvertently acquired a large vinyl collection 14 years ago), I do have a large CD library (300 plus) that I need to listen to again. So the Devil can’t take them yet.

Wine Industry Conditions The Worst In 40 Years?

As the few readers of this blog would know, I enjoy wine, particularly red wine. I also own shares in Treasury Wine Estate, the main (virtually sole) wine company publicly listed on the ASX.

Last week, I went to a winery dinner at a pub in South Melbourne. The convenor of the Bottle Club I regularly attend is close friends with the owners of a family owned Barossa winery, and arranged for tickets for us to go to this dinner.

It was a very convivial evening, and the winemakers were very generous with refills of their two flagship red wines (which have a recommended retail price of over $200 per bottle).

After the cheese platter was served and people were standing around chatting, glass in hand, I approached one of the owners along with my friend. I asked about how it was that Treasury had lost 30% of its share price in the past 6 months, and Australian Vintage Group (a relative minnow on the ASX) had lost over 80% of its share price in the past three years.

His reply was as sobering as it could be for an investor in the wine industry who had happily had his two glasses refilled several times over the course of the evening. He said that industry conditions were the toughest he had seen since his teenage years, when the vine pulling program had gone into effect. In fact, conditions were tougher than when the vine pulling happened.

I had been vaguely aware of the vine pulling program, which gets alluded to in various of the books on Australian wine and its history which I have read. But I had not really thought about it too much. After all, in 1987 when it happened, I was a silly 18 year old blundering into adulthood and making my fair share of dumb decisions.

The vine pulling program was a South Australian government initiative to subsidise the removal of uneconomic grape vines in 1987, a time when the wine industry was on very hard times. As a result of this, we lost a lot of ancient vines which might have been used to produce some very high quality wines (FYI, old vines produce less fruit, but of much higher quality).

Knowing that times are tougher now in the wine industry than they were almost 40 years ago is not great news. Not only am I a nominal investor in the wine industry, but I feel a great connection with and affinity to the industry and to winemakers generally (I am an amateur wine maker after all). When they suffer, it makes me feel sad.

And even though I have limited skin in the game, watching Treasury’s share price drop under $8 this morning was not a pleasant experience.

A Happy Day On The Sharemarket

At the end of March, one of those share market newsletters I subscribe to tried spruiking another more premium newsletter dealing with share market volatility, talking about ‘Big Wednesday’ – a period of great volatility and falls.

I wrote about that matter at the time. Soon after, the Trump tariff announcements caused some falls, followed immediately afterwards with great rises – a kangaroo market as some financial journalist called it.

That newsletter didn’t talk about Big Wednesday after that for a few weeks. Last week, after almost 2 months, they started predicting Big Wednesday yet again. Just as they have predicted it at various other times in the past few years.

I’m not going to listen to those predictions. I am inclined to think that a prediction about the megadraw jackpots this week on both Auslotto and Powerball are just as likely to come true.

What I think the takeaway from my experience at the time of the Covid bear market in early 2020 is that sitting on one’s share portfolio instead of trying to time the market is a safer bet for long term wealth.

Today was a very happy and totally unexpected day on the ASX for me. Washington Soul H Pattison, commonly known as Soul Patts, announced a merger with Brickworks.

For my entire life (56 years), Soul Patts and Brickworks have been in a strategic alliance where they have been significant shareholders in each other’s company. This has takeover proofed both businesses, although there have been raiders and shareholder advocates who have tried to undermine this arrangement.

With the merger, this will create a $14 billion conglomerate, which will probably be even more takeover proof than the cross shareholding arrangement.

As of ten seconds ago, the share price of Soul Patts shares have surged $5.64 since the opening bell this morning. That represents (given I have 5000 shares) a gain of $28,200 today. This has never happened to me before – mostly sudden share market movements have down seriously south.

I assume that profit takers will liquidate their holdings, and that once the endorphins wear off, the share price will drop again.

But I’m not selling for a quick profit. Soul Patts is the closest thing we have in Australia to Berkshire Hathaway, and I am holding on for the long haul.