Newsagency/LP & Company Home Products – Campsie, NSW
Beamish Street (above, top left to bottom right) cuts across Campsie like a knife wound, only instead of blood, a spurt of discount stores, fresh produce markets and newsagents has erupted into the populace.
A news-hungry populace. Seriously, there are no fewer than three newsagents active in a very small area here, with at least three more recently departed ones I can recall.
But is it the news, or is it something else these shops provide that has kept them in the Beamish mix when so many others (including McDonald’s – twice!) have dropped out?
Sometimes, my job here is made very easy. The Old Tab Cafe suggests another rarity: the departure of a TAB. Don’t worry, there are still at least three TABs within walking distance of this cafe, but what’s beginning to form is a picture of a suburb that loved to have a punt.
As many nostalgia websites love to remind you, Australia’s suburban demographics are in a constant state of flux. What was is very different to what is, and the habits of the old don’t necessarily appeal to the new.
Campsie is a great example. Originally so Anglo it features an Anglo Road, the suburb is now home to a large Chinese population – and the shops to match.
This former chemist at 235 Beamish tells you all you need to know. In are fried chicken and a dentist (what a combo); out is the passion for the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, the area’s beloved NRL team. All that remains to remind us of a more supportive era is a solitary Bulldogs insignia, ravaged by time and weather.
The appeal of Da Doggies may have burned brighter in Campsie’s TAB days, but Chinese gambling habits don’t necessarily align with those of yesterday’s Anglo Campsians. Mahjong and pokies have taken the lead as the preferred way of chasing that elusive jackpot over sports betting or that other friend of the working class, the lottery.
Which brings us to the star of today’s show, 245 Beamish Street.
This site was once home of a Mr John Foreman Watson, who may well have backed winners and losers during his time on earth, which ended right here in October 1954. Eerily, it could be that the paper containing Watson’s obituary was sold at the very place he checked out.
Because here too stood one of Campsie’s many newsagencies (this one with the very no-frills moniker “Newsagency”), now replaced by LP & Company Home Products. Not a Sydney Morning Herald or lotto ball in sight these days.
Or is there?
Shift your perspective and you’ll find Francois Vassiliades did his best to hide the standout feature of this former sweeps station, which now peeks out from behind the ‘sold’ sign.
The Big Lotto Ball’s placement on the shopfront is an instant and arguably unwelcome reminder of a time when the promise of a big win towered over current affairs, and jackpots and bulldogs stood side-by-side just out of reach of the common man.
La Bettola Italian Seafood Restaurant/For Lease – Rozelle, NSW
Rozelle’s an area renowned for several reasons: it’s the gateway to Balmain, there are plenty of former mental patients roaming the streets, and it plays host each weekend to fantastic markets. Darling Street is peppered with great restaurants and op shops, but since the suburb isn’t as working class as it once was, not all of these are able to stay afloat. Case in point: La Bettola, an Italian seafood restaurant. The place gets big points for having that big fish mounted above the building, and I’d like to think he fell off on the day they closed their doors for good. Why did it close?
Gee, that fellow at the top wasn’t very happy, was he? Perhaps they closed in November 2008 and he just didn’t realise.
Prior to its life as La Bettola, this was a pub dating back to the 1920s. Rozelle’s pub scene dwindled once the area became less industrial – with a lack of workers needing to quench their thirst at the end of a hard day, the business dried up, so to speak. One other interesting footnote from the life of this building: in 1944, a time when lotto winner addresses were still made public much to the delight of extortionists everywhere, Mrs. P. Nolan and her aptly named “Lucky Last” lottery syndicate won fourth prize in the week’s lotto draw.
Barrier Miner, Mon 29 May, 1944
With foresight like that, you think she would have done better.
Past/Lives of the Near Future 