Magic on Main Road

This week Evelyn and I went for a little morning shop along Main Road in Ballarat. It was meant to be just one spot, but given how great this one block is, it turned into a three venue visit where I made us stop there because we could have done many more.

For those of you who don’t know, some of the spots on Main Road:

1. Mr Jones – one of Ballarat’s best restaurants and a personal favourite of mine that blogged about here, back when they did this amazing breakfast menu on the regular with the most incredible deep fried Thai eggs. They don’t do breakfast anymore, but check them out for dinner. They have a hat for a reason.  Authentic Thai street food.
2. A great mural by Travis Price on the side of Mr Jones which I blogged here.
3. Kank Wolverang Records – vinyls, coffee, band tees and vibes, and part of this blog post. Not Ballarat’s only record store (vinyl lovers have been into the New York Street cafe situation of L’esspresso since humans loved coffee or jazz), but its own unique feel closer to a live music feel, tuning in to rock, pop, punk culture.
4. Antiques Ballarat – which we visited on this trip and I’ll mention them a bit more below.
5. The Main Emporium – vintage and retro clothes and things.
6. The Dressing Room Recycled – vintage, retro, thrift and more. This place is big and plentiful. You will need more than an hour if you visit just at this shop, so I made sure we didn’t visit this time as we were out of time already. Will go back there soon!
7. The Known World Bookstore – Pratchett fans, this is definitely one of those shops that is a direct portal to L Space and the one I pictured when the Librarian goes into it. For those of you who know nothing about Terry Pratchett, if you love books, this shop is for you. There is no book lover this shop is not for. Part of today’s blog post.

We started off walking towards The Known World, our destination for the day, and just had to stop in at Antiques Ballarat. This turned out to be expensive but fun for me because I spotted something I collect. When I was young I spent a bit of time with my great grandmother, Dorothy Newin. She came out from England immediately after the war in August of 1948 and was a poet. By the time I was born she lived in a sweet brick house on Salisbury Avenue in Newington. Her kitchen had an AGA wood fired oven which would usually be lit in the Ballarat cold. She had all the classic kitsch pieces around her home of giant fork and spoon, ducks on a wall, melamine canisters, chalkware plates and more. If you think of classic kitsch, her house was the perfect example of it. One of the most distinct things I remembered from that kitchen, were these mugs she owned. Each mug was a cottage, painted and glazed in bright orange. She would make me a hot ‘Malted Milk’ with a dusting of nutmeg on top. Because of my memory of those mugs, I started collecting them an adult. A small way to feel connected to her still.

When we walked in I immediately spotted a small collection of the range, and to my surprise, the owner said she had even more throughout the store. She’s recently taken on a collection of them from a woman who had gone into care. I chatted to her about them for a bit and asked if she was still in contact with the woman at all. She said the woman visited the shop with family occasionally. I asker her to pass on that some of her pieces were going to me and that they would be so treasured in their new home. She said she would. I offered to send her a picture of them to share and asked if she knew what a Touchnote was.
For those of you who don’t know, a Touchnote is a postcard you send through an app on your phone. You can take any photo, upload it, put in the address and they print it and post it for you to anywhere in the world. During the pandemic, my darling grandfather was in care so I couldn’t see him. He was also a little deaf, so chatting on the phone could be hard. So I sent him Touchnotes of little things that I was doing so that he still felt loved and connected. I told this to the woman in the Antique store and she said to me that my grandfather was still with me and loved me very much. It was a very sweet thing to say and made the next thing that happened very serendipitous.

Once we left the antique shop we went into the Known World Bookstore and when I was digging around for old theatre programs my hand pulled out a Ballarat High School yearbook from 1942. Realising what timeframe this was, I flipped to the back of the book where the student roll call was listed to see my grandfather’s name: Wain, D. I. This was the place he studied and would have written in his elegant, scripted handwriting, the handwriting he would later use to write my name on postcards. The school I would later go to. Of course I bought it. You can’t have someone tell you that your grandfather is with you and then have his name arrive in your hand like that as though it’s nothing.

I also walked out with five or six pieces of the pottery collection back at the antique store that I have to tell you about.
This particular style of pottery is called cottageware. There are a few places that made it but I’m into the one from Price and Kensington. Cottageware was from the 1940s through to the 1960s. Did they remind my great-grandmother of home?

This one pictured below was one I had never seen before, as it shows the interior of the cottage, where most pieces feature only the outside.

The ones my great-grandmoth had were Price and Kensington, and it may seem like I’ve repeated myself there, but it’s an important distinction. Price Bros and Kensington earthenware were separate pottery companies until the 1960s when they were merged. I saw these mugs in her kitchen in the 90s. So when collecting these mugs, the ones from Price Bros alone tend to be older and a little more expensive. The designs of them are slightly different. I do collect both but the Price and Kensington ones are my preference.
I already had in my collection: six mugs, a butter dish, a biscuit jar (that is missing a handle and I use for tea bag storage), a sugar bowl (that I got two weeks ago from the mill market), egg cups (price bros), a toast rack (price bros), a standard teapot, a coffee teapot and a jug. From the antique shop I took home: a serving bowl, a cheese dish, a small milk jug, a small teapot, a cruet set and a stunning large jug.

I had them on a shelf in a cupboard at home, but with so many pieces I’ll now have to rearrange my display to make them more visible.

A beautiful bird I would have bought if I wasn’t buying the store out of Price and Kensington pieces.

Normally I’ll dump in a mention of my outfit at some point, but today it is topical. This vest adds to the sentimentality of remembering lost family members because it belonged to my sister, Maja. I’ve written before about how my sister died here.

This vest she bought on a student exchange trip to Italy in high school from a store called Pimkie. I’ve had this outfit saved in my Stylebook wardrobe app for some time and was so excited to finally wear it.

Everything in the outfit is long-loved. The trousers were thrifted (either from a Mill Market or from The Main Emporium, I cannot remember which). The shoes are a decade old from Modcloth. The hat I’ve had for years, possibly from Dotti. The shirt is spectacular and it’s a slow fashion piece from a UK brand called The Seamstress of Bloomsbury.

Thanks, Evelyn Zeven for being photographer again! Hanging with Evelyn is especially fun because she’s been a fan of my blog for years and is so enthusiastic about taking photos (she was the drive behind us doing a blog shoot on this day; what a gem!). I am also really enjoying the writing part of blogging, so thanks to all those who are taking the time to read. Part of the reason I started blogging in the first place was because I loved writing. I’ve been inconsistent on the blog front since the pandemic and this is the most wonderful return attempt I’ve made so far. The content, the photos, the words are all flowing nicely and it’s been really rewarding to do.

Check out the fairy entrance to the bookstore!

On my hands and knees, digging in the low shelves, right before I found the school yearbook with my grandfather’s name in it.

This little sign was hilarious. If you can’t make it out it says ‘Agatha Christie is behind you’. Felt like a pantomime moment where the kids are shouting ‘he’s behind you’ and the actors are playing dumb until the kids scream louder and louder and by the time the actors turn around the villain has had time to get off the stage.

Look at the gorgeous Gucci picture book we found in the kids section!

Tell you something cute about this photo. This is “Hap” Hayward. This is the moment I met him. When I was a kid I would go for voice lessons at a place called Soundtrax. It was a recording studio upstairs from a music store called Midwest Music. I’d sit in the waiting room before the lesson and read and re-read the names of the bands on the posters in the room. Bands like Epicure and The Dead Salesmen. I thought about that when I listened to his interview on the 20 Square Blocks podcast. Anyway, I got chatting to him about how much I loved the store and said it reminded me of that feeling of being “in” the music scene I got those days I was sitting at Soundtrax reading those posters and I said it having no idea that this was Hap Hayward, who is in The Dead Salesmen. He said something like “Dead Salesmen! That was me!”. What a cool moment.

My queen Suzi Quatro! Seen her live about 5 times. Adore her.

-L