Parkmore

I stood entranced by the automated puppet show in a coin operated display cabinet. Hardly surprising since everything is a novelty to small children. Only a few metres away were automatic sliding doors and they fascinated me too. At the time they were triggered by pressure sensors in a rubber welcome mat but later that will have changed to some sort of light sensor over the entrance.

This is a likely anecdote from my childhood in the 70s. I say likely because memory can be both very sharp and very fuzzy that long ago. I definitely was into both the mechanisms described but did I feel that way on exactly the same day? It hardly matters. Parkmore was my first experience of an enclosed shopping centre and there is plenty I recall from its original incarnation.

I'm surprised to discover that it is pretty much the same age as me. As far as I'm concerned it has always been there. Of course I know that such shopping centres are very much a post-war phenomenon but it opening while I was a baby is news to me. Apparently John Farnham popped into perform at its inaugeration. All I can tell you is what it was like to visit for family shopping.



The centre was small by our standards now but you could still get lost in it. This was in part due to its asterisk-like internal layout. Several hallways radiated from an octagonally domed central hub. Shorter ones connected to the entrances while longer ones accessed the major 'anchor' stores of the centre. You could easily get those hallways confused. Archives say that originally there were clever colour-coded rows of lights in the ceiling to tell you which path you were on but nobody ever told me that. I just made use of store recognition to navigate (and if lost you could always just return to the hub).

The hub itself was most distinctive for three shops in the form of free-standing stalls. One sold ice cream and milkshakes so I could hardly forget that. Another I do forget but let us say it was something eminently practical like a key cutter. The third however was more than a shop - it was free entertainment in the form of a glass blower applying flame to glass tubes till they became glowing toffee and then shaping them into parts of various trinkets for sale.

Today the hub or an area close to it would be a food court. Back then however there was only a smattering of food stalls. The largest was the Red Balloon carvery and cafe. It had big red spherical hanging lamp-shades which dimly lit its space and provided a contrast to the far brighter lighting of the rest of the centre. It exists even now but the last time I went there it had lost its distinctive atmosphere.

Parkmore got a major extension and redesign by the turn of the century and to me was difficult to recognize. Gone was any semblance of the asterisk. Its growth was very much warranted by the expansion of the outer south-eastern suburbs but by then I had moved away and barely ever went there. I confine my recollections then to its original smaller iteration.

Time spent there may well have involved Mum visiting Venture while Dad visited Clark Rubber (at the ends of separate hallways). Venture was more interesting to me (it had a toy department) but Mum took way longer to browse things. Clark Rubber was less interesting but Dad got things done so then we had more of a chance to get an ice cream and sit on one of those circular plastic benches centred around indoor plants. Life got easier once I could wander off alone. Lukas and I spent time in Toy World. Other stores I recall were Brashes Records, Copper Art and the ominously named Liquidator (a store similar to the Reject Shop). By the 80s I think the centre had a small extension - suddenly there was an escalator but it only went to a rooftop carpark. A visit would always end with gathering at Coles New World for foodstuffs to take back to the car.

I turn now to the brick-walled outside of Parkmore. Some stores could be accessed from its encircling footpaths and there was also one useful space for the community. Back then the greater Dandenong area lacked its own cinema so in school holidays movies would be played in general purpose venues. Parkmore had its own auditorium. I'm pretty sure I saw one of those slapstick action movies from Italy starring Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer there. Beyond that the only kind of outdoors you could enjoy were car parks. Parkmore indeed! Okay across the road there has long been a large park complete with playground and pond but that is thanks to the local council rather than the shopping centre.

I had originally wanted this post to be a more wide-ranging essay about shopping centres as sites for both commercial and community activity but realized all I felt like was reminiscing. I can always do that bigger entry another time. For now I will throw in my proposed list of criteria for shops that also facilitate face-to-face interactions. They are variety and competition, shopping and other activity, indoor and outdoor spaces, the familiar and the novel, access and comfort. And there was one last criteria called 'right sized' which interacts interestingly with the others. The bigger a centre is the more variety it has but the smaller it is the better ease of access it has. I could try testing the old Parkmore with these criteria but possibly you can do that yourself by drawing on what I have described here.