Rosebery, day and night

The long, straight stretch of Gardeners Road that runs through Rosebery has houses on one side and shops on the other. Mid-way along the shopping strip is a building much grander in scale than the rest, though now dilapidated: a former cinema with a wide, neo-classical facade. The cinema was called the Marina for most of the time it was operating, but I think of the building as Videomania, after the vertical sign that hangs from the roof, from its latter days as a video store.

Every time I approach Videomania I expect it to have been demolished, and while it does change in minor ways – a mural painted down the side of it in the mid-2010s, and more recently, the front awning removed – it marks the ebb of the years with its rust and peeling paint, resistant so far to redevelopment, though surely not for too much longer. Every few years I stop to take a photo of it, thinking it will be the last one.

In 2012

In 2015.

In 2020

This time when I stop I make sure to inspect it closely. On the facade the seashell rendering makes up part of a scuffed canvas, along with bill posters ripped back to reveal their previous layers, and the recessed remains of the marquee above the entrance. Down the side of the building, by the fading spraypainted pink panther emerging from the green snarl of a tag, is a side door with a KEEP OUT notice on it. The door is padlocked but there’s a wide enough hole where a chain’s been threaded through for me to look inside to the cavernous interior. The seats are gone but otherwise its reasonably intact: the stage with its long curtain pulled back, the proscenium arch, the red-painted ceiling. The flutter and coo of pigeons resounds from within. At the far end are signs from its video store days, an arrow pointing to the Greek movies section, the rates for hiring new releases and weeklies.

Gardeners Road is something of a time capsule, from the days before shopping malls and big box retailers. Despite the number of empty stores, their attrition no doubt hastened by the pandemic, there are some that have been there for decades. One such business is Mr Yawn’s mattress shop, which has plastic-wrapped mattresses lashed to the front doors and various versions of its mattress mascot on display.

For many years, passing by Mr Yawn’s, I had wondered why it seemed so familiar. Then it came to me: I remembered the blue, yawning mattress with outstretched arms from the frequent airings of tv ads for Mr Yawn that broadcast when I was a teenager. In them Mr Yawn – embodied by a person wearing a mattress with a yawning face as a costume –  would describe the features and specials in a tone of somnolent excitement. The ads usually featured Mr Yawn on the footpath outside the store on Gardeners Road frantically waving his arms to attract attention. 

There has been no such media exposure for Giacco’s Shoe Repairs, which trades in an intriguing combination of giant amethyst geodes and shoelaces. When I pass by it is closed, but I peer in through the door at the rows of geodes that flank the counter, trying to figure out the connection between shoe repair and crystals. I’m not saying there needs to be one. When I lived beside Parramatta Road in the 1990s I’d often go by a shop with a sign for “tobacconist and jeanery”, which seemed like an invitation to imagine other such unlikely combinations. 

At the western end of the shops is Sam’s MFC supermarket, with a wall of cans of olive oil in the window, priced with a flutter of taped-on paper labels. Inside the smell of olives and spices encloses me, aromatic and comforting, and I browse amid the vats of olives, dry goods and massive bags of spices for a while, wondering if I would manage to consume 6kg of cinnamon even across my whole lifetime. 

Further along the street I look in on the Evergreen Spot milk bar, with its melamine booth seats and perspex menu board, sizzle from the fryers, and ‘cash only’ notices in prominent positions. 

Usually I only see the exteriors of these places, from the windows of a car or a bus, on my way east or west. This section of the road is so straight and flat that it has the effect of a roll of film or a series of pages, and my attention moves smoothly from one shop or house to the next. Sometimes I look out at the shop side, other times the house side. The houses are on the north side of the street, bungalows on wide blocks with bore water signs in their gardens, a reminder of the flows of groundwater that underlie this land, as water drains towards Kamay to the south. 

If it’s night when I’m making this journey it’s hard to discern much in the dark, but I look for Arida’s International Fruit Market, which is the only shop beside the takeaways that stays open late. It’s like a lamp lighting up the nighttime, glowing with fluorescent light and the displays of fruit and vegetables in the interior. 

But today as I walk along Gardeners Road it’s bright with spring sunlight, and I can see all of the details clearly.