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Who else, when a teenager, worked in their parent’s small business? A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit the site of my father’s old newsagency in Canberra. It was all shuttered up, but that didn’t stop me being hurled back in time.
The upside of working for a parent is you get to see them as a professional person, with skills. The downside is that they get to boss you about, even more than other parents.
So much of this world – the world of a 1970s Australian newsagency – no longer exists.
From a young age, my father taught me the trade. The greeting cards don’t carry price stickers, he explained, as their exorbitant cost might put people off. But, on the back of the card, there was a string of printed numbers in which the Recommended Retail Price was embedded – but only to those given the key to the code.
How exciting. By the way, this is still the case. (Sorry to reveal a trade secret. I may have just betrayed the newsagent’s code.)
My father had also worked out that the daily newspapers were the lure that brought people into the shop, so they were placed against the back wall, so people had to walk the length of the shop to grab a copy – past the display of snow domes featuring Parliament House, past the wooden unit featuring coloured cardboard sheets for school projects, and past the copious offerings of nudie magazines. A customer who walked out with an afternoon newspaper costing 10 cents, and nothing else, was a rare survivor of my father’s sophisticated Psychological Operations.
All these years on, when I visit IKEA to buy a lightbulb and find myself required to walk three kilometres, limping my way past every item in their catalogue, I find myself thinking: “You stole this idea from my dad, name of Ted, Canberra businessman in the 1970s.”
‘To the extent I had a privileged adolescence, I’m embarrassed to admit I owe it all to Penthouse, Hustler and Escort.’
IKEA aside, so much of this world – the world of a 1970s Australian newsagency – no longer exists. Does anyone still offer tourist-attraction snow domes? Do people collect souvenir teaspoons, with a crest of the town embedded at the top of the handle (a big part of our business)? Do kids still do projects about “The Australian Gold Rush” on yellow-coloured cardboard – staining the cardboard with tea, then half-burning it in the oven, so it looks like a genuine gold-rush gold map?
Actually, when it comes to the school projects, they must do, as my local newsagent has the same melamine unit (slightly chipped, like ours) with all those sheets of coloured cardboard, each sheet anointed, like ours, with tiny, circular price stickers.
Other things, though, have certainly disappeared. When I was on the cash register, there was one order so common I never needed to add up the three prices. It was a copy of Sydney’s The Daily Mirror, a serve of Vincent’s powders, and a packet of Winfield Blue cigarettes. That third item was advertised by Paul Hogan with the slogan “Anyhow, have a Winfield”, to which he should have added “Anyhow, it will probably give you cancer”.
Vincent’s Powders, on display at Woolworths, in 1970. The olden days were wild.
After selecting the required brand of cigarette from the vending stacks above where I was standing – they stretched the whole length of the counter, offering maybe 40 brands – I’d announce, “That will be $2.74”, or something like that, I can’t quite remember. But I never had to add it up. Next customer? Same order, same price.
In the years following, Vincent’s was banned, alongside its competitor Bex, due to a side-hustle of killing people. Then The Mirror went bust, alongside its competitor The Sun. And people stopped buying so many cigarettes, on account that you could no longer buy a pack for $2.74, and still have a newspaper and headache powder thrown in.
The other thing that disappeared, well almost, was the printed pornographic magazine. In retrospect, its reign was short-lived – the three decades between the dismantling of strict censorship in early 1970s Australia and the wave of digital filth unleashed by internet in the late 1990s. During this period, most newsagencies – including my father’s – owed much of their profits to what were euphemistically called “top shelf magazines”, even though they were normally on brazen display. To the extent I had a privileged adolescence (we had a pool!), I’m embarrassed to admit I owe it all to Penthouse, Hustler and Escort.
I have one more example of a product that has mostly disappeared: the “partwork”. When I worked for my dad, our customers were big fans of what were really reference books, but delivered in weekly or monthly instalments. In a way, it was the opposite of all that pornography. This was about self-improvement. For a couple of dollars, and then a bit extra for the “folders” or “binders”, you could build up what was essentially an encyclopedia about World War Two, or Classical Music (by the ’80s, a free CD with every copy), or the Amazing World of Nature.
It’s true that most of my adolescence was spent selling overpriced birthday cards, cigarettes, and frankly appalling pornography, but I take pleasure in this one thing: the partworks. I’m pretty sure the last five heads of the Canberra public service owe much of their knowledge to me, and the partworks I sold their parents. All in our family business.
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