Peter Goers: Every South Australian has memories of Hindley Street, just as it is

Every South Australian has memories of Hindley Street from Miller Andersons to Marcellina’s – the council’s clean-up plan is not what it needs, writes Peter Goers.

Apparently Hindley Street after dark is squalid. How wonderful! Why are we surprised? It’s only been thus for the past 170 years.

The Adelaide City Council is considering spending up to $40m to tart it up with wider footpaths, improved lighting, more trees and fewer car parks. That won’t help. What will help is the encouragement of the daytime economy of Hindley Street – more shops and restaurants. If it wasn’t for the glorious Imprints Bookshop (the fount of all knowledge), Cacas Chemist, O’Connell’s Bookshop and the Grainger Studio, I’d never go there. It’s quite easy to get a car park in Hindley St by day and that mustn’t change.

We tut-tut the young drunks of Hindley Street on the prowl with inexplicably scantily glad girls and forget that we were doing the same in Hindley Street in our party years. Remember driving down the strip just because you could?

Hindley Street after New Year’s Eve. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

In 1980 I spent an uproariously drunken evening with the cast of Evita in a basement restaurant next to the Sebel Townhouse. The next day I was telling a friend about this hilarious evening and she informed me that she was sitting next to me all night. Oops. The same year I drunkenly roller-skated at Downtown with Lorraine Bayly and Alfred Sandor the stars of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. By 1990 I was watching the sun come up over Hindley Street with the Doug Anthony Allstars.

Once I had a rock star carpark outside Rio and I lurched out completely legless and shickered and was about to drive away until the drag queen Roger Shepard snatched the keys out of the ignition because we were being watched by “Lilly Law”. So I can’t deny the young drunks, but just hope they are safe. Not everyone has a fairy godmother in Hindley Street.

Hindley Street changed when the famous Flash Gelati moved across the road, then disappeared. The East End revived and the West End declined. Hindley Street was an entertainment precinct which became a booze strip.

The Crazy Horse is still there on the site of an old ice rink and happily Marcellina’s – arguably South Australia’s oldest dedicated pizzeria – is still as good as ever. Hindley Street was once a theatre district and home to the much lamented Theatre Royal, the Art Deco movie palaces of the Metro and West’s and the Fair Lady, the State Theatre and the Greater Union complex which became a happy clapper church then folded.

There was the glamour of nightclubs and restaurants sadly before my time – Paprika (where Big Pretzel twirled her pasties), the Bay Ganew (OK), La Cantina (where show folk relaxed post shows), Pagana, Sorrento plus brothels and I recall a service station which catered to taxis, a modern ten-pin bowling centre, the tailor Maurie Kerrison, Fletcher Jones (of blessed memory), La Belle strip club and Chantal Contouri’s BBQ Inn.

Do you remember… Hindley Street on November 8, 2021. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

The Desert Sands led the coffee lounge era of raisin toast and Chinotto – the acme of sophistication. I miss the Goodwill Op Shop and the restaurants Jerusalem and Quiet Waters, the latter run by Abdul and Jamir. I loved the old Third World Bookshop which was vaguely salacious and full of shopworn books.

Hindley was and is a raffish glitteringly gulch whereas Rundle Street East is Cappuccino Canyon and now more bourgeois than bohemian. Hindley Street needs more shops, restaurants and Fringe shows. The University of SA has revived the western end of Hindley Street and Youth Inc – a non-traditional school – is now resident in the gingerbread folly of West’s Coffee Palace. Good.

Was the old Victoria Hotel (later Jules and the Woolshed) a temperance hotel? I’d go to town with my mother (she in hat and gloves) and if we were flush we’d have bangers and mash for 75c in the dining room of the Victoria among country folk.

Every South Australian has memories of Hindley Street from Miller Andersons to Marcellina’s. The statue of Mo now rightly presides over the passing parade of mugs. The young rush to small laneway bars to spend $300 a night on cocktails while bemoaning the fact they’ll never afford a house. Gin (OK) and bear it. Viva Hindley Street, then, now and forever. I get my squalor at home these days but good luck to those on Hindley Street sitting in the gutter looking at the stars.

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide.