It is a small but most interesting world-despite the frustrating, often tragic, political and social issues of the day. Back in the l980s , my wife and I espied a tiny FOR SALE notice in the greasy window of an old china shop in Jetty Road, Largs Bay , Adelaide. It was one of five shopfronts in a rundown terrace building built in the l880s to cater for overseas shipping which brought passengers to the nearby jetty , a train running into Adelaide. Built at the same time was the impressive Largs Pier Hotel , where Jimmy Barnes exercised his tonsils in earlier days , diagonally across the road. The china shop was closed and all the other shopfronts were empty. Why not have a go ? we both thought .
And so we bought Invicta Antiques from a struggling English couple and launched ourselves into a whole new fascinating world of auctions, house clearances, wheeler dealers, collectors. To make the china shop window look different , I inserted a large model of the huge WW11 Japanese warship Yamato among the delicate cup and saucer sets, which must have caused puzzlement.
A quick and cheap paint job in navy blue and gold I did on the weathered wood and lacework around the window appalled two finicky gents who were restoring a fine old building nearby. They sniffed that I had made it look like a cheap Greek joint instead of ye olde curiosity shoppe .
In a bout of enthusiasm , we rented one of the empty shopfronts, started the Den of Antiquity, a name lifted from an old English antique book, dealing in a wide range of goods, including furniture, pictures, aeroplane propellers , uniforms and a book section which rapidly expanded, one single mass purchase was 15,000 volumes, with an associated mail order book catalogue . Each year the smiling landlord conveyed the joyous spirit of Christmas by announcing the rent would go up 10 percent in the new year.
We encouraged a merry band of others interested in antiques, art, militaria , old radios and gramophones , ephemera , rustic furniture , kitchenalia to take up the empty shopfronts. One of those was a great guy who had spent some years in Alice Springs when he was a schoolboy. He distinguished himself when he chased and lassooed with a rope a man who had attacked a woman in a railway subway. By the time police arrived he had the miscreant neatly hogtied .
A cooperative , at one stage , took over a shopfront and displayed a number of paintings in the window and inside which appeared to be variations of female genitalia . For some strange reason, I was asked by a concerned shopkeeper for my expert opinion on the subject, and while I said it appeared that the paintings were indeed of the said naughty bits , they were rather scary renditions, a bit like views of the Grand Canyon in various stages across the aeons . If , as suggested, the paintings were done by a doctor’s wife, he may have been a gynaecologist and only engaged in shoptalk at night.
Jetty Road grew in popularity and in our enthusiasm we said it would eventually become the Golden Mile . Fun was had by one and all . A demented Russian chased me with a penknife, a man who asked a woman who lived on the premises to show him her tits for a trifling amount of money was soundly thumped by her bikie husband , there was a strange siege nearby which involved kissing cousins, one of the residents in the terraces packed his basement with tinned food because of a firm belief that we were engaged in World War 111 and the wife of well known scribe told us she had broken into a flat, grabbed the fur coat her husband had given his girlfriend and ruined it by putting it through a washing machine . A little old lady who looked like the grandmother in The Beverly Hillbillies surprised me when she asked if I stocked any dirty books. Eh?!!!It turned out she was after racy American comic books for young men parked outside in a car who looked and sounded sod busting hillbillies .
After leaving South Australia , with fond and odd memories of our time in Largs , we headed back north , eventually returning to Darwin. Last year we were in Adelaide and booked into the Largs Pier Hotel , above in earlier days , now renovated a la Raffles style with punkahs , and fondly inspected the old terraces across the road; all the shops were closed , only one in the old wares business, our book shop which , we were informed , hardly ever opened and displayed the same books year in year out . The elusive Golden Mile mirage was nowhere to be seen.
My wife , Judith, assists in the Genealogical Society of the NT office , Cavenagh Street, Darwin, and recently in walked a person seeking information about his family. He supplied the name of his father and stepmother- the people who sold us the china shop! Hanging on our wall at home is a painting of that shop , Invicta Antiques. Of course, my ever loving surprised by instantly rattling off details about the couple on the spot and is now chasing up family history for him in Britain . – Peter Simon
