Round the Brown Owl corner
After Michael Fallow’s discovery 10 days ago of the Brown Owl cafe restaurant, surely New Zealand’s first licensed such establishment, we thought to follow around and see what else was once to be found in that inner-city Invercargill block.
On Saturday mornings you could go upstairs in a clangy lift and learn highland dancing from Scots dance teacher Sandy Sutherland.
He’d draw a cross with chalk on the wide sunswept floorboards and once you learned to dance over that without smudging the chalkline you did the same thing over tape measures, then three-foot rulers and finally, at the end of the term, Spud Tait and I graduated to doing a twin sword dance over real silver swords.
We shared a tiny silver cup and forever afterwards the man who grew to epitomise Southland rugby kind of looked the other way when I rushed to remind him of the fun we had as
children. He grew to marry fellow teacher Frances and is lost to us all now.
After dancing, down the dim stairs and around the Brown Owl corner, past Lewis Drapery Company’s big groundfloor displays, and on to A C Millar’s cake shop where we would have a Saturday morning treat of a spicy buttered bun and lamingtons.
Then on to a decade or two later, the Fountain coffee bar, one of the first in the city, right next to the marble steps of the Majestic Theatre and its imposing manager, the bow-tied Mr Vic Troon.
Then past McCracken and Wall’s radio repair (‘‘come back on Tuesday’’) to Brass Brothers menswear, then, the wind at our back, we were blown around the Bank Corner to meet the folks battling into that fierce westerly.
Ah, my dad would say, you have to be old and live here a long time to know how to take this corner.
Then along the street to the beautiful Cambridge Place arcade, where up the stairs inside, Miss Jenny B Rodger, was
beginning her fledgling Little Gallery, the gift shop which was later to relocate and face H and J’s from the sunny side of Tay St for the next 70 years.
Gifts bought, we headed back to Tay St, past the Peter Pan milk bar, and suddenly we would reach the corner with a pub upstairs, the Cecil.
Along Kelvin St, to a little creche where small children waited while their parents shopped and visited pubs.
Then to the next corner where another pub the Kelvin, was fated to stay standing when all about it falters and falls.
We’re coming to The Southland Times now, and I think sadly, that that pink and cream facade must go. For if left standing with no newspaper behind it it will be like a death mask.
Better to place on the front, as on all the new frontages proposed, a small plaque saying what was there. In this case: The Southland Times was here, a newspaper of record for a century and a half.