I was prompted to write this story in response to the recent death of Mr Nicolas Fotiou, a Greek immigrant and deeply enigmatic man who owned and ran the Olympia Milk Bar in Sydney’s Stanmore for nearly six decades. He had become something of a local legend, keeping the doors of his worn out milk bar open, long past the glory days of this much loved Australian institution.
In the early 1950s there had been a milk bar on virtually every corner of Australia’s cities, suburbs and country towns. These mixed business sold milk, newspapers, groceries, bread, cigarettes, confectionary (lollies in Aussie speak), milkshakes and ice creams. Us Aussie kids came to milk bars to satisfy our lust for sugar; and as we grew older they were the venues for our first flirtations; little wonder they are so lovingly documented in Australian literature and poetry.
…we would all race down to Parry’s milk bar, there to ingest the milk-shake of our choice and rob the lolly counter when Mr Parry wasn’t looking. The only time Mr Parry ever caught one of us he contented himself with delivering a white lipped lecture. It was a wonder he didn’t call the police. Anywhere in the world, immigrant shopkeepers have a particular horror of being robbed by the locals.
Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs
The milk bars evolved and changed over time. Brought to our shores by Greek immigrants in the early thirties, they were not so much about food at first. Flavoured milk and sodas were served from long, hotel style bars to Australians seeking a bit of Hollywood glamour. Soon, new waves of immigrants (mostly from Greece) opened cafés as well as milk bars, heralding recreational dining for Australian families. The food was never fancy – maybe hot chips, a mixed grill, hamburgers or toasted sandwiches to go with the ubiquitous milkshake. Later there might be dim sims on the menu and Chiko Rolls: a culinary wonder invented in the early fifties by a boilermaker from Bendigo who set out to produce something that could be eaten with one hand at a football match. This Australian version of Chinese-style chop suey in a tube is deep fried and stuffed with beef tallow, cabbage, onion and carrot.
do you remember the Ritz Café?
with its coleus plants
I hated them
did you?
and we had milk shakes for a shilling there
you know I went back
it’s still there much the same
but the coleuses have gone
and they sell Chiko rolls now too
Kate Llewellyn, ‘Speaking Of’
The first shops to open and the last to close, the cafés and milk bars were hubs for local gossip and pit stops for travellers. Some of the Greek proprietors chose anglo names like ‘Regal’, ‘Royal’ or ‘Empire’ in a nod to Australia’s strong ties to its mother country. Others opted for glamorous American names: ‘The Golden Gate’, ‘Monterey’, or ‘Broadway’. The Niagara Café is still serving customers in Gundagai.
A traveller in headache powders
Talks too loudly in the Niagara Café
Where an old shearer over plastic flowers
Yarns with a mate who is not there.
David Campbell, ‘Niagara Cafe’
Australians can talk your socks off about the lollies we used buy with our twenty cents of pocket money. With my gang of friends we would take turns to make our selection, standing solemnly before the boxes of strawberries and creams, jelly snakes, rainbow balls, freckles, teeth, milk bottles, musk sticks and chocolate buds. The woman behind the counter hovered patiently white paper bag at the ready. She had a squint and we nicknamed her Blinky Bill, after a koala character in a children’s book.
In his Unreliable Memoirs (1980) Clive James waxes lyrical about Hoadley’s Violet Crumble Bar, a slab of chocolate coated honeycomb, which shatters into ‘yellow shrapnel’ when bitten, ‘like trying to eat a Ming Vase’. The Fantails (sadly discontinued this year) came wrapped in yellow paper, each printed with a film star’s biography. They contained a chocolate coated toffee that was
…so glutinous that it could induce lockjaw in a mule. People would have to have to have their mouths chipped open with a cold chisel. One packet of Fantails would last an average human being for ever. A group of six small boys could go through a packet during the course of a single afternoon at the pictures, but it took hard work and involved a lot of strangled crying in the dark.
The ultimate in confectionary, according to Clive, were Jaffas: marble sized bright orange globes of candy coating a dark chocolate centre. He described how, once the child had sucked or bitten them to their fill, the rest became ammunition. Hurled in a darkened cinema, ‘they would bounce off an infantile skull with the noise of bullets hitting a bell.’ This wasn’t just a game for children. On one of her lasts visits to the cinema, my feisty old mother started a Jaffa fight, much to her grandchildren’s glee.
In adolescence, it was in the milk bar that we might lock eyes with the cool boys over our anodised milkshakes cups and marvel at their pinball skills.
And a girl in the Everest Milk Bar
Whose tit* rubbed the cold of the ice-cream churn
As she reached down with her cheating scoop –
You saw more if you asked for strawberry –
Peter Porter, ‘Homage To Gaetano Donizetti’
The Chiko Roll makes another appearance in Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s raw semi-autobiographical novel Puberty Blues (1979) about two thirteen year-old girls desperate to fit in with the surfie culture of North Cronulla in the seventies. While on the beach, one of the girls is given the order from her boyfriend to head for the milk bar.
Go get me a Chiko roll and don’t take a bite out of it on the way back or you’re dropped [dumped].
Kathy Lette later mused that as surfie chicks in the seventies, they were ‘treated as nothing more than life support to a pair of breasts’.
Each milk bar and café offered a personal window on the history of immigrants in Australia. They told stories about poverty, hardship, dreams and sometimes betterment. In John Tranter’s poem ‘Con’s Café’, reference is made to the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, a post war undertaking that took twenty-five years to build and prompted tens of thousands of men and women from all over the world to make the difficult journey to this land.
those kids on skateboards and a raft of sun
skidding into Con’s Café where the coffee
tells us of its long journey from the mountains
and the hydroelectric schemes our fathers
sweated for – what comic’s that you’re reading?
Archaeology – the milk-bar mirror’s baubled
with cloudy scoops of light –
and the first-year girls in cardigans
are almost ‘sophom*ores’, but only in the light
reflected from a distant movie screen –
John Tranter, ‘Con’s Café’
Yet although these Greek cafés and milk bars were essentially selling Australians an American dream that life could be full of greater promise, life for the Greek families themselves was tough. The long opening hours meant everyone in the family was expected to help out for the good of the business. Families could rarely have holidays, share dinner together or celebrate events.
Their long demise began with the rise of supermarkets and competition from the likes of McDonalds and KFC in the 1970s. One by one they closed their doors; sadly a few still stand empty behind sun kissed and faded facades. So it is that Australians of a certain age turn a little loopy when they encounter a good old fashioned milk bar that is still open.
Earlier this year I was driving down the main road of Woodend in Victoria and there it was: the Mountain View Cafe Milk Bar. It looked run down and battered, its signage was disintegrating, but its door was open. I screeched to a halt and slipped into a scene from childhood, complete with checkered linoleum floor, Streets Ice Cream signs, formica tables, and anodised milkshake cups.
The Mountain Viewis owned by Mrs Constantinou. She and her husband bought the business more than thirty years ago. They started out selling groceries but when the supermarkets opened, they switched to takeaway food. People from all over come to photograph her shop, she told me, and they beg her not to change a thing. I bought some of her best selling confectionary: chocolate coated liquorice.
Olympia Milk Bar
This experience reminded me of another encounter with a very old and faded milk bar and its mysterious owner. In Sydney’s inner west suburb of Stanmore, I would sometimes meet up with my sister and catch a film. Next door to the cinema was a decrepit milk bar that was always empty. Stepping into this dim, cavernous place used to make me feel like I’d moved into a time warp. Everything seemed unchanged for decades from its ancient cash register and soda pumps to its faded billboards of men wearing Brylcreem. On the back wall a neon sign that was no longer lit read: ‘Late suppers, steak, sandwiches, snack bar’.
The elderly Greek proprietor who emerged from the shadows seemed shockingly white and thin. He wore an apron and a solemn expression, and would stand in front of rows of lolly boxes that were mostly empty. We would scan them carefully and ask for something we could see that he still had.
Some years later, long after the cinema had closed, I was astonished to discover the milk bar was still open. I called in and the proprietor was just as I had remembered, only now a little more stooped and ghostly. I tried to engage him in conversation but he said he didn’t want to talk about memories. He asked me if there was anything I would like to buy and caught off the hop, I asked for a Mars Bar before checking the boxes. He said he was waiting for new stock but could offer me coffee or tea. I opted for coffee.
It turns out that it wasn’t just me who was fascinated by the Olympia Milk Bar and its mysterious owner. The Olympia was listed on the NSW Heritage Register and has its own Facebook page, Olympia Milk Bar Fan Club with thousands of members. Fans used to report sightings of Mr Fotiou and and brief exchanges with him in his milk bar. His reticence was famous. He could best be engaged by Greek speakers, but only ever wished to talk about his business, nothing private.
Mr Fotiou continued to lovingly tend his milk bar seven days a week, until its crumbling state forced the council to close it down in 2017. He refused many offers of help to repair and restore his shop. ‘Slowly, slowly, slowly’ he said in his thick Greek accent, about how he wished to reopen the Olympia. ‘But not to rush me. How long it will take, no idea.’ He continued to spend his days inside his milk bar, solitary and intense, seated at one of the laminated tables or moving between the shelves at the back of shop. He wore his apron, as if ready for work. Eventually, fears for his safety in the milk bar and the rooms above the shop, led to his removal. Mr Fotiou died in a nursing home two years later in October 2023 aged eighty-six.
Nicolas Fotiou had lived through the German occupation of his native Greek island of Lemnos. For four years the island’s inhabitants endured forced labour, hunger and random punishment.
After his death, Nicolas’s cousin Glen agreed to talk publicly about him so that his uncle would not be remembered as a mysterious shadowy figure, or sometimes cruelly as a vampire, but as a son and brother. Just after the war, when he was thirteen, he left his family and village of Repanidi to join his eighteen year-old brother John, in Australia. The brothers learned the milk bar trade in Wagga and other country towns before buying the Olympia in 1959. Glen remembered going there for dinner in the sixties. ‘It was like [the television show] Happy Days. It was their home, they owed nobody nothing. They had no debts.’ There seemed to have been a promise between them that after the death of one brother, the other would always be safe, as long as he remained at the milk bar. But once he was forcibly removed, it was the beginning of the end for Nicolas Fotiou. Glen’s daughter said: ‘he wasn’t where he felt safe any more.’
Music
The Newcastle Song, Bob Hudson
This novelty song was a hit in 1975. The lyrics describe the mating habits of Australian Novocastrians and an incident in front of the Parthenon milk bar that once stood on Newcastle’s Hunter Street but has since been demolished.
Weblinks
A short documentary by Joshua Brogan about the Olympia Milk Bar.
Madelaine Lucas shares her childhood memories of the Olympia Milk Bar in this article.
In the 1980s photographer Effie Alexakis and historian Leonard Janiszewski began documenting milk bars all over Australia. Here is a short film about their work that includes a short feature about the Olympia Milk Bar.
Eamon Donnelly has been documenting milk bars and corner stores for many years. Here is his Facebook page.
In this article for The New York Times Besha Rodell writes about the ‘sweet siren song of the milk bar’ that called to her as a child in Melbourne.
The advertisem*nt for Chiko Rolls, demonstrating their main selling point.
Sources
Baker, Jordan and Maddox, Garry. ‘For Decades, passersby would peer into Nicolas’ shop. Nobody knew the real story behind the iconic milk bar’, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 7, 2023
James, Clive. Unreliable Memoirs, Pan, 1981
Janiszewski, Leonard and Alexakis, Effy. ‘Shakin’ the World Over: The Greek-Australian Milk Bar’. In M. Rossetto, M. Tsianikas, G. Couvalis and M. Palaktsoglou (Eds.) ‘Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University June 2009‘. Flinders University Department of Languages – Modern Greek: Adelaide, 320-332.
Lette, Kathy. ”Fetch me my Chiko Roll’: Kathy Lette back home in Puberty Blues stomping ground’, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 29, 2021
Lette, Kathy and Carey, Gabrielle. Puberty Blues, Penguin, 1979
Mclennan, Stuart. ‘Greek Cafes and Milk Bars – not the ‘Good Old Days’ for Everyone in Australia’, Neos Cosmos, 12 September, 2017
Maddox, Garry. ‘In a darkened milk bar, Nick waits for customers who will never come’, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 5, 2018
