Alan Williams Karate Centre/nothing – Penshurst, NSW
More like PensHURTS
Right now you’re feeling as excited as I was to stumble upon this sign. B-B-B-B-BAM! Damn! It’s like a FIVE HIT COMBO to your GROIN!
WHACK – Alan Williams!
SOCK – Alan Williams’ name in its original katakana!
BIFF – He has a KARATE centre!
THWACK – Tae Kwon Do too!
OOF – the official Alan Williams dojo logo featuring the official fist of ALAN WILLIAMS.
Now you’re stumbling around, numb from the waist down, and all you can think about is HOW DO I GET DOWN THOSE STAIRS AND SIGN UP?
Well sadly, there are no stairs. At all. There is no dojo, nor is there an Alan Williams. Maybe there never was. The only people who would ever see this sign are those heading to the TAB at the end of this bizarre corridor, so maybe downstairs is some kind of veiled reference to hell.
State Bank/Vinnies – Hurstville, NSW
State Bank, Hurstville, 1986. Image from Hurstville Council.
The State Bank of NSW started life in 1933 as the Rural Bank of NSW. In 1982 its name was changed to the State Bank, and in 1994 was sold to Colonial. The Colonial State Bank carried on until 2000, when it was taken over by the Commonwealth Bank. For the unenlightened, CommBank love money to the point where they’d take it from a posse of old women hawking old Burt Bacharach cassettes and Queen Elizabeth II memorial coaster sets…
Former State Bank, 2012. The clock wasn't working.
The building still sports a safe, and one of these:
For midnight deliveries of bulk lots of X-Files VHS tapes.
Vinnies are pretty thorough with their signage, but there’s always something to give it away. Observe:
Dot your i's, Vinnies.
If by Hurstville you mean a building appropriated for at least the second time hawking things nobody wants on a one-way street then yes, this truly is Hurstville.
Milk Bar/Professional Laser Hair Removal – Strathfield, NSW
It takes a visionary mind to look at a milk bar and think ‘THAT’S where I’m going to realise my dream of removing hair by laser, professionally.’
This shop is across the road from the former Arnotts Biscuits factory at Strathfield, and would have once provided workers with hamburgers and refreshments. From what I can gather, Ecks was a big player in the soft drinks industry until the 1960s, when it was absorbed by Shelleys. Shelleys was absorbed by Coca-Cola, and the brand name changed to Kirks. Soft drink melodrama aside, it looks like somone punched a hole in the wall below the Ecks logo in the above picture. What’s that about?
James Castle & Sons Art Metal Workers/Gould’s Book Arcade – Newtown, NSW
Gould's Book Arcade, 2012
There’s not much that can be said about Gould’s Book Arcade that isn’t already well known. The labyrinth of old, dusty books has become a Sydney institution, and a perfect fit for the suburb of Newtown. In the building’s first life, however, it was James Castle & Sons Art Metal Workers, who apparently specialised in creating furniture and pulpits for churches and synagogues at the turn of the 20th century.
32 King Street, 1988. Image by Robert Parkinson.
Looking back nearly 25 years, the building seems to have hardly changed at all. Gould’s appears to have moved to its current location from Leichhardt in either 1988 or 1989, but prior to that it was located on the corner of George and Bathurst Streets in Sydney.
Gould's Book Arcade, George Street, circa 1983.
Keith Lord Furniture Electrical/Brescia Furniture Showroom/derelict – Ashfield, NSW
I remember when I was a child, I was taken on yet another tedious day trip to Brescia Furniture, on Parramatta Road at Ashfield. When we attempted to sit on one of the lounges to see how it felt, we were rudely told to get off by one of the staff. We left empty handed.
Karma’s a bitch, isn’t it, Brescia?
The showroom was built in 1975 for Keith Lord Furniture, replacing their old site:
Keith Lord Furniture and Electrical, Ashfield NSW, April 1965. Image courtesy Library of NSW.
Lord died in 1978, and by 1994 his chain was dead. Along the way, this showroom was sold to Brescia, for whom it became a model store. But in 2005 it went up in one of the worst and most intense fires in Sydney’s history. It was said that the combination of leather, varnish, wood and other flammable materials all stockpiled together in a 30-year-old building didn’t help over 900 firefighters put out the blaze over three days. I guess that’s why they didn’t want us on the lounges.
Past/Lives of the Near Future 