Another relic sitting along Parramatta Road (where would I be without it), this…I don’t really know what this is.
The building itself doesn’t help, with all its allusions to great deals and hard to obtain articles. The place is full of strange old junk…
It might have sold office supplies once, before the owner went mad and decided to hoard everything instead of selling it. Some people collect vinyl records, others collect filing cabinets. At one stage, the building also appears to have housed the Strathfield Burwood Evening College:
Not…entirely sure what you could learn in a place like this, but I bet they had a damn good filing system. Still, a closer inspection of the windows proves they weren’t kidding about those hard to obtain articles:
That’s wisdom.
BARREN UPDATE: According to reader Claire, this place – that was absolutely stuffed with goods – was suddenly mysteriously empty when she passed it a few months back. This I had to see.
Not only was it for auction, but it sold, unlike 100% of the merch that once filled the room. But what of that merch? Let’s zoom in.
The boasts of discount prices and the eye-catching stained glass windows were still there, and surely added to the value of the property at auction.
Now those articles really are hard to obtain. Thanks, Claire!
For more on the history of this peculiar building, including a picture from when it was still Homebush Newsagency, check out Strathfield Heritage.
Past/Lives of the Near Future 
Gee give me something harder to solve…. this is the original Homebush newsagency. It served this role from the mid 1920’s to around 1979/1980 when the owner locked it up as mysteriously as Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and filled it full of useless junk. It briefly opened as a junk shop yet the goods were horridly overpriced and all stuff on offer was wierd like old telex machines, medical instruments and strange apparatus only required if you were planning a budget Frankenstein’s laboratory. The place closed doors and all that stuff is still there. The owner still resides there from time to time intermittently however the dusty stock remains as it was 20 years ago. Yep the sign says “hard to obtain articles”. The place is full of hard to find “junk” from floor to ceiling. Wierd stuff that no-one wanted then and no-one wants now.
A recent update 13/7/12. A few of days ago a team of locksmiths drilled out the locks on the old newsagency (now a closed junkshop) and replaced all the locks. They took photos as they did so. Later I picked up one of the brass drilled locks that had been discarded on the footpath. Some serious work changing locks. Meanwhile the ex-newsagent that was responsible for filling the place with useless junk over the past 25 years, tried all his keys soon after and couldn’t get in. I’m not real sure what is going on here, however it would seem the owner/leasee for the past 3 decades must have some sort of law suit against him, locking him out of the building and all his useless junk. In some way shape or form, this building (most likely by some court order) is being re-posessed by circumstances a bit unclear.
I lived down the road from this shop for about six years, and it was always chock full of stuff (as in, I couldn’t see how anyone could get into the shop, let alone walk around in it), and I never saw anything change or anyone go in or out. A couple of months ago I drove past and saw the place has been emptied out! What a shock!
Back in the 80’s when it was a newsagent the name of the proprietor was “Slade”.(he was Polish and drove a black and white Range Rover) I used to be a paperboy walking between cars on Wentworth Rd each afternoon selling papers back when it was a busy road before the freeway was put in.