auburn road the other day #1

I grew up (well, lived from the age of 7 to the age of 18) in Scott St Hawthorn, a trivial side street off Auburn Road which is a main-ish street in, you guess it, Hawthorn. Actually Auburn Road almost runs the length of Hawthorn within coo-ee of the longest section of that more or less triangular suburb. A few days ago, I walked most of the length of it - from Auburn Station, south. 

Soon after alighting I went into an op shop that looked promising but wasn't. Although it did offer the tantalising opportunity to purchase works by the two great Gilberts, standing side by side.

The Murphy grain merchants seemed an anomaly in the 70s when I lived around here, and who would have thought it would still be trading in apparently, well, if not grain, then grain-related (animal feed) stuffs. When I was trying to get to the bottom of the story of the land across the road from my mother's house, which had been occupied by a grain merchant, I discovered a lot of grain merchants ended up branching out into fuel - which makes sense on one level - and no sense on most levels. Murphy Brothers apparently chose not to go there. 

I just like this:

This was an op shop very influential in my youth. I bought secondhand copies of both 1984 and Brave New World here, for instance. It is largely unchanged since whenever I used to hang around here, probably the late 1970s, and it's still actually a pretty impressive shop.

This was our chemist,  back in the days when people had chemists

The Riversdale Hotel - a pretty bog standard hotel in my day. Amazing red ('flock'?) wallpaper. Then. 

This was the local branch of the State Savings Bank. Pretty cool building, I wonder what it replaced. 

This was 'our' newsagent. Another remarkable building. 

 I'll get onto what happened next later on. This is a big walk and it's tiring.