toppa 2

 

So being on strike and therefore not working I slipped into the PROV this afternoon and looked at everything they had relating to Toppa. There was virtually nothing and what there was, was not enlightening I am sorry to say. The main things, apart from that slender accounts report from the 40s above (the most interesting aspect of which was that their factory at this time was in Capel St, North Melbourne, and I use the term 'interesting' not advisedly but actually falsely), was some hard-to-follow court documents where various people had sued (loosely speaking) Toppa for injuries they'd incurred while working for the company. 

Aside from a few things like this (there was also a case of a portable scaffold that fell down), there's another court case where Peters Ice Cream claims that the Toppa people didn't give back a freezer cabinet. There must be more to this than meets the eye. But I don't really get it. 

So I wish I could tell you more about Toppa but at the moment that's all I have, and it's nothing. 

toppa the world

You might remember in 2006 I reminisced about how fond my feelings were towards the Toppa Ice Cream company. Perhaps my affection is linked to the fact that, as of 1966, the company was owned by British Tobacco - might also explain why I still get a slight yearn when I smell cigarette smoke (I've never smoked). What I don't really understand is why, when that company was doing such great guns in 1966 when (according to the Bulletin, anyway, which I suppose might have had some rationale to promote something that wasn't as hot as it seemed, though surely the Bulletin wanted cred) 'several... firms would welcome the Toppa fold under their wings', it basically disappeared in the early 70s.*  One of the things Toppa did in the mid-60s was move its factory from Brunswick to Preston...

Melbourne Age 12 May 1971 

and then wait five years to sell the old one, or something. That space is now, I gather, occupied by these townhouses, although there might have been something else in-between:

This is where they were at in 1970, looking for a mature man. Perhaps immaturity was a problem they faced? Hard to tell. Branching into diary products might have been a mistake as well. 

Toppa disappears from the pages of the Age in the mid-70s, and I gather at some point in there they were bought by Paul's, who always pissed me off because I assumed they were named in response to Peters, which didn't seem fair. But there was a two-hour moment in early 1972 when Toppa really got into the groove:

The Age 16 December 1971

How rad would that be? Yeah, I reckon they used words like 'rad' then. 

Anyway, if I can think of any other avenues to find out what happened to Toppa I will go down those avenues, though possibly what happened to them is they were bought by another company which shut them down, that's the end. 

* 'Expansion in the food industry' The Bulletin 8 January 1966 pp. 48-49

my favourite icecream

Last night I was re-reading David Collier's book Just the Facts which is one of my favourite comic books (eg as in book compilations of comics). Collier has a few good things to say about nostalgia eg when he parodies Chris Ware's (what Collier sees as) uncritical nostalgia by making him star of a strip where, by aid of a time machine, Ware is sent back to the 1920s and goes around collecting everything he sees forever, and is of course unable to throw anything away.

I have a strong sentimental feeling about the Toppa icecream company (pic is the Toppa display at the Melbourne Show in 1954 - I'm not in it) I suppose because it was a whole culture (as much as I understood culture in 1970) that disappeared apparently overnight. I have a nostalgic feeling for all kinds of no-longer-available icecreams actually, presumably because that's one thing I absolutely know without a doubt I will never experience again, unless I get that special dementia Oliver Sacks wrote about.