Mystery in the Melbourne CBD
In 2019 Aurora Melbourne Central will be complete. It will be the second-tallest building in the Melbourne CBD. Walk by there today and you can witness the impressive square hole in the earth the building requires. This construction solidifies a kind of retail complex sandwich. Aurora will give us more of the cube-shaped investments we crave and will form the top slice of the sandwich. In between lies Melbourne Central and the adjacent buildings as a kind of filling — the lettuce, tomato and cheese. Making up the bottom slice is the recent addition of Emporium, a high-end refurbished mall connected to the older, world-wearier Melbourne Central via an overpass. Walking through the neighbourhood today, I recall how the middle of this area has changed. The popular Indonesian restaurant that’s now an EzyMart; the coffee shop that’s now a fledgling Korean fashion store — things change in any city, but there’s one place in this area that seems to have quietly changed while staying the same.
There’s an old Chinese restaurant called Peony Garden on Little Lonsdale Street between Elizabeth and Swanston Streets, right in the heart of the mega-mall sandwich. To me, it’s one of Melbourne’s most mysterious places. Little has been done to repurpose the restaurant’s old exterior, so when you walk by you might be puzzled to see old cameras sitting behind its dusty windows. If you were to stop and read the sheets of paper on said windows, you might be even more puzzled to discover that the place also sells peonies — a popular flower traditionally grown in the colder regions of Central and Southern China.
To describe the place using only words and without a visual aid has proved to be challenging for me over the course of writing this, so let’s take in all the elements for a moment. There was once a Chinese restaurant named Peony Garden that now sells old cameras and the very perennials it was once named after. This place exists and is alive and well today, right in the heart of some highly desired real estate. The building and its history aren’t easy to pin down. It’s not a singular thing, but rather something defined by its layers.
I’d been walking by this place for a few years and developed a fascination with it. I started to wonder about the story of its evolution over a time frame that’s roughly as old as I am. I’ve lived in Melbourne for a decade now, but I’m not a native Melburnian, so I can’t recall Peony Garden’s days as a restaurant. I have no idea when it became a camera shop, and the point at which it started selling peonies is also beyond my grasp. Instead of doing any immediate research to come to a logical conclusion, I let my love of fiction take over. I pictured a scenario involving the Toy Maker in Blade Runner or a Chiba City ware shop in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Maybe it’s a place where, among the vintage cameras, you discover a telefax machine that can communicate with someone from the past. The setting alone makes it ripe for someone with an active imagination. It looks like a dusty novel among the row of buildings it occupies. I knew there was a logical and tamer explanation for the many faces this place has worn over the years, but I’d already projected my noir fantasies onto it. Was it closed for good? Did it operate online in some capacity? I couldn’t tell. In my head it had reached a mythical status. But after a while the fantasies wore thin and I wanted more than passive speculation.
A simple Google search was able to yield an entertaining Yelp review and a Reddit post from 2014 confirming that the place actually did open. That was all I could find. So one day, when I walked by the place, I stopped to read the flower advertisements. Standing under the old takeaway sign still hanging from the building, I learned that Melbourne has a drastic climate that may not always be accommodating for peony growing, and that there is a hell of a lot of varieties on offer. They also seem a little pricey, but that’s just my opinion, I’ll leave that to the flower enthusiasts to decide. Under one of the advertisements in the smallest of type, I saw that the trading hours were from 1:00 P.M. to 2:00 P.M. Monday to Friday. Turns out it wasn’t that hard to engage with the place — it would just be inconvenient as hell for me to do so. On the day I went to visit I noticed that the metal grate was open and swiftly sent my wife a text that said, “Holy shit! They’re open!”, and I walked inside.
The first thing I noticed was the attic smell — not entirely unpleasant, more like how an old book smells when you crack open its pages after decades of neglect. The inside was as dusty as the exterior, but there was actual life. There were three other people and all of them had an interest in cameras. It was hard to imagine how the place once looked as a restaurant, as it was nothing more than an open floor with a few fold-out tables and old boxes that held a number of camera-related ephemera from a bygone era. Some of it was worthless, other items looked priceless. Old still-life paintings hung on one wall. Every item seemed to have a story behind it, and for twenty-three hours out of every day (excluding weekends) those stories go on hiatus until Peony Garden’s doors open again. The cameras you see in the windows are most likely in a junk state and not worth buying, but when you go in you’ll find that the collectible and potentially useable cameras are neatly arranged behind glass cabinets and tended to by a nice gentleman who runs the place, along with his wife. I can imagine how a genuine camera enthusiast might be able to spend Peony Garden’s full business hour examining them. On the wall there were old reviews of Peony Garden — the restaurant — from the Good Food Guide and other sources. My suspicion is that the place never closed because it was bad. Maybe it was just time to do something different.
I should also mention that Peony Garden has a website, but on the website you will find only things related to peonies. So, really it depends on your interest, and those interests couldn’t be more different from each other. I have no interest in cameras or peonies. My interest was just in a place I find unique, something that swam around in my head until I forced myself to break down the fiction. I walked out of the place with a strange feeling that I had unlocked a self-made mystery, but also happy that I was able to just see the place for what it was, and enjoy it. I had a good conversation with the owners, as well. They are a very nice couple who know a lot about the products they are selling. That’s all I’ll say. They run their shop the way they see fit, and if you’re lucky enough, they might just tell you more about the place if you talk to them.
The row of buildings Peony Garden sits in and among are not heritage listed. These are prime sandwich properties. There are some great black and white photos from the State Library of Victoria that show what this street used to look like, before Melbourne Central was constructed. It’s still easy to see how some parts of the city have managed to stay roughly the same over time. I’m no enemy of progress, I actually enjoy seeing how much the city seems to be in a constant state of forward movement, but it also makes me wonder how much we’re stopping to pay attention to the smaller, quieter places, before they just become stories.
On Little Lonsdale Street, in the shadow of all this progress, there’s a nice older couple doing what they want, whenever they want, with something they have. It has a heartbeat, something you have to listen to a little harder in order to hear, but it is very much there if you have a free hour.
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