Streets are landscapes of loss. Alongside the buildings and people who currently occupy them, the vehicles, street furniture and signage, there are ghosts of buildings that have been altered or destroyed, traces of businesses that have closed, people who have come and gone, countless variations small and large that are always in process. This is particularly evident in a walk along Chapel Street Prahran. Continue reading
Picking up the walk at the corner of Commercial Road and Tyrone Street, on the border between South Yarra and Prahran, we headed east towards one of the busier shopping areas in the Melbourne suburbs – as the name Commercial Road implies. This is an area where the past seems particularly alive. The area still contains many traces of former days, from Victorian buildings to art nouveau styling to ghostsigns. Continue reading
Something I notice again and again as I walk the suburban streets is old advertising for long-gone doctors, medical services and medicines. Whether it’s a Victorian ghostsign on Gertrude Street offering vaccination and tooth pulling, another in the city for ‘the celebrated specialist Dr King’ (who turned out to be a clairvoyant) or faded messages declaring the benefits of products like Otis Tonic Tablets, the suburbs are rich in evidence of the medicinal options of former Melburnians. Continue reading
At the corner of Lennox Street and Rowena Parade is a Victorian shop (dated 1878) on which some very faded ghostsigns can be discerned. The words ‘General House Repairs’ are just about legible between the upper storey windows, and I could make out ‘Builders’ and ‘Carpenters’ above the ground floor windows, along with the now almost illegible name of the former owners, which appears to read ‘ … ETT & SONS’. Continue reading
Some interesting ghostsigns can be found on a building at the corner of Swan Street and Byron Street, Richmond. There’s not much to see, at first glance – just a stock-standard two storey row of Victorian shops. These days the two shops on the corner are occupied by a patisserie and a Tattersalls, with a handy ATM in between them.
Melbourne Circle: stories from the suburbs 