milk bar

On the other side of the hill that the Nicholson Street cutting cuts through is a milk bar. They sell Regal Rockets and as a four-year-old that’s all I need to know. Every corner has a milk bar in 1955 and every milk bar is unique. Each has a contract to sell a particular brand of ice cream, usually Peters, Sennetts or Toppa. In Warrnambool it’s Regal. I love curling my tongue round a Regal Rocket.

In 1958 someone shoots a couple of bullet holes in the plate glass window of Murray Weideman’s milk bar in Heidelberg Road opposite my grandparents place. I go over while we live there to marvel at those little holes; it’s as close as I’ve got to crime in my short life.

In 1974 I live in a disused milk bar at the end of a dead-end street in Ringwood. The back gate of the primary school opposite and a laneway from the next street were its saving grace but it still died over 40 years ago.

That Warrnambool milk bar is now just a sore thumb stuck on the front of a house. Most milk bars are these days. The pristine white convenience store and the supermarket have killed the hard-working family business where every family member did their turn behind the counter.

The Hungry Wombat milk bar six doors away up my current street is under new management. The sign in the window has been there every day for the thirteen years I’ve lived here. The installation of vats of sizzling beef fat to cook fish and chips will stave off its demise by about five minutes. Like every surviving milk bar it gets tattier by the month.

Some places I’ve lived have the milk bar as general store—Chum Creek, Menzies Creek, Clematis. These stores are hubs of local life. Faded notices for private hairdressing or the disposal of unwanted kittens flap on boards by the door. Dead flies pile up along the windowsills inaccessible behind old hoardings, racks of broom handles, shelves of fluffed up sliced white bread.

These days only migrant Asian families are prepared to do the hours a milk bar demands. No Dave or Madge rises from a battered stool in the corner to take your milk money any more. That’s just the way it is. Modernity.

Rock on.