Business is booming

THEY'VE been selling guns here since 1886.

110716 margaret pollock

IT was never part of Margaret Pollock's life-plan to own a gun shop.

Twenty-six years ago she and her late husband were running a TAB, getting a bit sick of it, and looking to move into a new line of work. She wanted to open a fabric shop – textiles are her passion – but her husband had his heart set on buying a firearms business. He won.

Still, she’s proud that RF Scott & Co – which opened its doors in 1886, when Ballarat was flush with gold-rush cash – lays claim to being the oldest surviving gun shop in Australia. She takes pride, too, in the old-school retail experience it offers: vintage paintings and mounted antlers line the walls, the displays are stuck in a 1950s timewarp, and the floor has long seen better days. The place hasn’t been refurbished in decades. It works for her customers.

“Fellas feel comfortable in here,” she says. “They don’t need to be scared that they’ll make a mess.”

Pollock was around firearms from an early age – she grew up on a farm outside Ballarat – and regards them in utilitarian terms. “A gun is just an instrument,” she says. But she appreciates the craftsmanship that goes into a piece like this Miroku 12-gauge, with its fine-grained walnut stock and its exquisitely engraved receiver. (The price? $2500. But don’t choke on your coffee quite yet; a really top shotgun – a custom-made Beretta, say – will set you back upwards of 60 grand.)

Pollock has grown used to the way that some people, meeting her for the first time, recoil when they learn what she does for a living.

“A lot of women – and some men, too – are horrified,” she says. That’s when she’ll reveal her other side: the side that designs and makes patchwork quilts, and works in fine embroidery. She has exhibited her pieces, and takes commissions too. She only tells people that after she’s got the gun stuff out of the way, though. She likes to keep her powder dry.