Not all antique shops are equal. Some are lofty and five-star. Others are little more than junk shops, with stock that might have been sourced from a municipal tip. I’m addicted to all of them and I collect anecdotes about their eccentric owners, with most prime examples being Melburnians. Topping the list is the legendary Graham Geddes, who deserves his own Netflix series – to tell of the Indiana Jonesian exploits that once landed him in a Midnight Express-type prison cell.
In the 1970s I was briefly an antiquities dealer in the so-called and very posh Toorak Village. I asked Geddes to lend me a couple of Spanish side tables to be pedestals for some ancient Roman and even more ancient Egyptian sculptures. Prodding the sculptures suspiciously, he asked: “What’s this stuff then?” I explained the difference between an antique (more than 100 years old) and an antiquity (more than a few thousand) and it was a Eureka moment for him. GG was instantly hooked. And being a quick learner, he soon became one of the world’s most important antiquities dealers, regularly outwitting the competition at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Most of Melbourne’s most memorable antique dealers were neighbours of GG’s in Malvern. One of the most legendary was a high-end dealer who specialised in insulting anyone who dared enter his shop. Strangely, his grumpy reluctance to sell anything made would-be customers even keener. And to be fair, his stock was first class. But to finally persuade him to sell you one of his wildly overpriced pieces only made your problems worse. Having taken your cheque (we’re talking decades before the credit card), he would then prevaricate on delivery. For weeks, even months. Rather than drive customers away, this aversion therapy worked wonders for business. It boomed.
Far more seductive was the late Godfrey Hayes, whose downmarket shop was in downmarket Richmond. Instead of a metaphorical portcullis and drawbridge, Godfrey laid out a welcome mat. I would call in to watch him work wonders, giving dowdy pieces allure through dodgy provenances. Ditto with his elderly assistant/cleaner. Godfrey christened her Ruby Glitters and claimed she had danced naked on tabletops in the pubs of Bendigo and Ballarat during the 19th-century gold rush. The glitter, he’d tell his gullible clientele, came from the gold dust that randy miners would toss on her prancing and perspiring person. Ruby, if that was indeed her name, would ignore him and just keep on dusting. No gold dust in Godfrey’s shop. Just dust dust.
I vividly remember the maestro’s greatest provenance con. Among his items of tatty furniture was an overlarge couch; unsuitable for either casting or sitting on, it was as uncomfortable as it was ugly. No person of sanity or taste would dream of buying it. It should have been left on the footpath for council collection. Enter, stage right, two matrons even more richly upholstered than the couch. One looked at it and gave an understandable shudder. Godfrey’s instant reaction? “Madam, you have an eye! You’ve spotted the best thing in the shop! Its cushions are stuffed with swansdown. And down from no ordinary swans. The feathers in these cushions came from swans that graced the lake in the Czars’ Petrograd Gardens. The very swans that inspired Tchaikovsky to compose Swan Lake.”
Game, set and match. Out came the chequebook. Out went the couch.
‘You’re only limited by your own imagination’
Blacksmith Brendan Thompson sources metal from old wagons and farm machinery that’s lain in paddocks for over a century - and turns it into beautiful objects.
Go big or go home
It’s the largest TV you can buy in Australia, with a screen almost three metres wide. Price: a cool 30 grand.