The '70s stripped bare

The '70s stripped bare

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/16/1121455933362.html

By Peter Wilmoth
July 17, 2005

Vale Street 1975 would come to be regarded as a significant moment in Australian photography.
She was young, talented and ferocious. Carol Jerrems focused her lens on Melbourne's 1970s sub-cultures in a way that no one else dared to do. Peter Wilmoth reports on a new film celebrating the photographer's work.

It was when Carol Jerrems was making a film about a gang of 15-year-old sharpie boys from Heidelberg, most of whom had been expelled from school and, in their own words were involved in "bashing, beer, sheilas, gang bangs - which is rape - gang fights, billiards, stealing and hanging out" that she found out most clearly the cost of getting involved with her subjects.

"So far I have myself only narrowly escaped rape but was bashed over the head by the main actor while driving my car, which had just been dented by the rival gang with sticks. They steal my money and cigarettes when I'm not looking, but I refuse to be deterred."

Very little deterred Jerrems, even the game in which the sharpie boys drew straws to see who would "go off" with her. Her shy, earnest demeanor and angelic face framed by golden frizz belied a ferocious appetite for photographs that would capture the moment, a thirst for the next great shot that could - and sometimes did - endanger her life.

Friend Michael Edols recalls in a new film about her life that he and Jerrems went into a pub in Sydney's Redfern. "I remember watching Carol in the middle of this room and she turned her camera on this young man and photographed him." The man grabbed at Jerrems and tore off her necklace while Edols dragged her out of the pub and into the car. "On the way out," Edols says, "I got whacked in the chest and cracked two ribs. We had every window of the car totally smashed in, including the headlights."

"Carol was very shy and she didn't like being shy and she was always pushing against her inhibitions and her limits, and that often led her to dangerous situations," says Kathy Drayton, the director of Girl In A Mirror, about this extraordinary photographer's intense, short life. "There was a certain amount of naivety.

"Her photographs engage the viewer in an intimate relationship with her subjects. It's not always a friendly intimacy - sometimes her subjects look defensive, irritated or even menacing, but you always sense that you're seeing beyond the mask into the soul."

Jerrems was born in Melbourne in 1949, grew up in middle-class Ivanhoe and studied photography at Prahran College between 1967-70, where she was filmmaker and photography teacher Paul Cox's best student. "She stood out, she was odd," Cox says in the film. "She had this odd little smile."

Jerrems had found her calling early. In her second year at college, her confidence was such that she made up a stamp, "Carol Jerrems, Photographic Artist" which she would stamp on all her finished prints. "We were a bit scared of Carol," former Daddy Cool guitarist Ross Hannaford, who was also at Prahran, says in the film. "She was real serious. Carol was the first feminist I ever met. I remember she gave me a lift home once. I said 'Thanks, baby'. She said 'Come here. You don't call me baby.' Got a bit of a lecture."

Jerrems' success came quickly. In 1972, Rennie Ellis, the Melbourne photographer who died in 2003, opened Australia's first dedicated photographic gallery, Brummels, in South Yarra and selected the 23-year-old Jerrems' work as part of its first exhibition, a show called Erotica.

Always carrying a camera and flirting with the idea of danger, Jerrems wanted to capture the raw edges of the world she saw around her, subjects others weren't focusing on artistically: sharpie subculture, street life and urban indigenous people. "People were stereotyping indigenous people," said a friend, Ron Johnson. "I think Carol was showing 'This is not what it's all about, look, look at the expressions on people's faces - see what they're really feeling."
"People at the time were interested in traditional Aboriginal people while Carol was solely interested in urban Aboriginal people," says Kathy Drayton. "And at the time, sharpies were considered to be real bogans so it was unusual for someone of Carol's background to be interested in them."

Jerrems found work teaching photography at Heidelberg College, in the middle of a tough housing commission area. She was fascinated by the anti-social wildness of the boys, and spent time photographing them swimming in rivers, hanging around in backyards, wearing their skinned-rabbit jumpers, tight jeans and short curtains of fluffy dyed hair.

In this milieu, Jerrems found what Drayton calls the "brash sexuality of Australian youth in the '70s, a sexuality laced with vulnerability and darkness", and it inspired her most famous photograph. Vale Street 1975 is a mesmerising portrait of Melbourne model Catriona Brown flanked by two sharpie teenagers, the boys standing just behind in the shadows. The shot was taken at a house in Vale Street, St Kilda, at the end of a long day of shooting. Brown had asked Jerrems to take a shot for her folio, and Jerrems agreed, as long as she could shoot the boys with her, and use the shot for her folio.

The photograph is, says Drayton, regarded as a significant moment in Australian photography "as it bridges documentary realism and the more subjective style of photography that marks the post-modern era". The power of the photograph was the human connection. "Jerrems does not presume that she is outside the event without influence on it," wrote Helen Ennis, former curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia.

Jerrems' development as a portrait photographer coincided with rising interest in photography as an art form in Australia. Photographers were beginning to be deeply involved with their subjects rather than discreet observers shooting at a distance. Jerrems saw the traditional documentary style of photography as exploitative and believed the more personal collaborations between photographer and subject to be more honest, even if they were more risky personally.
Paul Cox once wrote: "She had to experience everything and feel things deeply before she could record them. She lived to the fullest, then withdrew into her own world."

Part of the power of Jerrems' work stems from its reflection of a certain pocket of life in the mid to late 1970s, the world of filmmakers, photographers and other creative types living in group houses. The sexual freedom and youthful confidence of the time, as enunciated and encapsulated by Skyhooks' Living In The Seventies album, is everywhere in her work. Drayton says Jerrems was "adventurous and forthright in her sexuality", having affairs with many of her friends, men and women, reflected in her work, "at times seductive, at others, frankly post-coital".

In the film, one of her great loves, the filmmaker Esben Storm, remembers Jerrems arriving in Sydney with new photographs. "Inevitably they'd be photographs of her waking up . . . with someone. While I'd been off sort of having wild times, she'd be having her wild times. She would sleep with someone and that would mean there would be an intimacy that would allow her to take photographs.

"It was the time of free love in a way, even though we weren't that free. There were ideals that it was uncool to be jealous and that you weren't possessive. We all tried to live by that, even though we couldn't really."

Greg Macainsh, Skyhooks' songwriter, remembers Jerrems photographing the band for a book called Million Dollar Riff. "She came to a number of gigs," he says now. "She was very quiet, reserved. She would make herself virtually invisible. I remember her in the dressing room being very still in the corner. She didn't take a lot of shots, she would wait for the right moment. She wasn't a motor-drive type, she was a bit like a sniper, waiting for the perfect opportunity."

Ross Hannaford was close to Jerrems for a while at Prahran College and remembers the seriousness with which she pursued her photography. "It was a time when there was incredible optimism in the air," he says now. "If you had a dream, you could do it. There didn't seem to be anything holding people back. I'd watch Carol shooting and I didn't realise what she was up to. 'What are you taking all that rubbish for?' But when you look back it seemed to encapsulate the times and the life around you. Her work took on a significance later on."

But amid the gaiety and youthful charge in Jerrems' pictures, Helen Ennis says a distinct change in mood is evident in the work. "The early photos between 1972 and 1975 were all about optimism. There's a huge amount of energy in them. It was all bound up with the excitement about the Whitlam government and this desire for change. But from 1976 I don't think they were anywhere near as optimistic."

Darkness

It wasn't just the Whitlam dream fading that gave Jerrems' work this darkness, nor the mood captured in the Skyhooks song Whatever Happened To The Revolution? ("We all got stoned and it drifted away"). While there is great exuberance in the decade the film documents, there is also a profound sadness about Jerrems' life. The odd little smile that Paul Cox talks about is rarely seen in the several self-portraits that feature in the film. Instead, there are many hints of the depression that she struggled with. Her friend Robert Ashton, who lived with Jerrems in a group house, remembers her bedroom door being closed for hours and even days.

In 1979, Jerrems went to Hobart to teach. Shortly after arriving she was diagnosed with polycythemia, a rare blood-related cancer. She underwent months of invasive and painful procedures, but came to a realisation she was dying. Jerrems photographed and wrote about her physical decline. She photographed doctors hovering, the scars on her stomach, and her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship, visiting. As the camera pauses on a shot of her mother, an actress reads from Jerrems' journal: "She is one of the few people with the ability to push me over the edge into tears or screaming."

Carol Jerrems died in Melbourne in February 1980, three weeks before her 31st birthday. Her work was bequeathed by her mother to the National Gallery of Australia. In 1990 a retrospective was staged, but until now Jerrems has remained unknown outside photographic and film circles.

Girl In A Mirror gives an insight into the counterculture of the 1970s - the music, the cars, the fashions, the social tensions, the sexual experimentation. Kathy Drayton, with help from the National Gallery of Australia, had access to hundreds of Jerrems' photos as well as shots from Rennie Ellis (who photographed Jerrems often), friend Robert Ashton and Henry Talbot. The journals Jerrems kept after 1975 are used to "narrate" the film.

Drayton, who has worked as an editor with SBS television as well as editing a variety of independent experimental films and short dramas, says her interest in Jerrems was piqued when she saw three of her photographs at a New South Wales Art Gallery exhibition. The "deceptively simple power and beauty" of the three photos haunted her, and she began to research Jerrems.

"There's an emotional intensity and intimacy with Carol's photographs," she says.
Who was Carol Jerrems? "There were a huge number of perspectives from people about Carol," says Drayton. "She went into roles with people, played games. She became whatever people wanted her to become."

Girl In A Mirror will screen at 3pm on Saturday, July 30, at Greater Union, corner Russell and Bourke Streets, as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Hairy skirts or sand in your tapas?

Hairy skirts or sand in your tapas?
Dusk to Dawn

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/13/1120934299559.html

Sally Jeremiah

July 15, 2005

You can't have it both ways, Melbourne's north-south divide is confounding "mixed" matches.
Newly emigrated mate from Bris-Vegas recently pondered where she might set up digs in Melbourne. It's a topic that inspires laboured discussion in provincial lounge rooms and online forums like mess&noise, where it is often the subject of vicious debate. Because while the hum of the inner burbs attracts a population that values nightlife within walking distance over the quarter-acre block, the city is dissected by a river, leaving folk to struggle with the unavoidable north or south question.

At times the journey from south to north feels like that to a "galaxy far, far away". It divides my mates - half live south side, half north, hindering any spontaneous decision to hit the corner pub for a couple of casual beers.

Pick a side.

In the north they're roasting pork on a spit in leafy backyards, in the south we're grazing on makeshift tapas from Astroturf-lined balconies. As effective as the Berlin Wall in its heyday, a soul-sapping Punt Road all too often puts a stop to thoughts of impromptu dinner arrivals.

In the north it's denser and darker. There are mahogany hued bars with flock wallpaper and bookshelves. There are lamps with actual lampshades and other shades of urbane bohemianism. Fashion? It's vintage; skirts are hairier. Best leave those ostentatious red cowgirl boots at home.

A brief stint in a single-fronted terrace out of cooee of the nearest tidal zone left me a little claustrophobic. The move south played out amid discouraging groans from Empress-going pals not to leave "the dark side", but I grew up with the sea air so it's no surprise my rental radar eventually honed in on St Kilda.

The shiny south exudes a more summery appeal, a sense of open space. It has trendier decor but less comfortable chairs. There's sand in the concrete cracks and a smattering of palm trees.
For the record: the number of times I've swum at St Kilda beach totals zero. But I live a mere seven-minute walk from that nondescript strip of shallow beach between pier and marina, should the urge ever take hold. In my playground the sun sets through the Espy bay window, frosty beers can be downed at the open sill of the

St Kilda Inn, and the informal warmth of the St Kilda Bowls Club is inviting on a Sunday night. And on the walk home, nine times out of ten the beer-inspired sandwich board slogan outside the George will make you chuckle aloud.

Not wishing to fan the flames of debate here. I don't camouflage my subjectivity, only celebrate it. We all go where the gig guide takes us; would $10 to see Six Ft Hick's limber singer lose a cuban heel inflicting a paso doble on a speaker at the Tote, be any better spent witnessing the same gusto at the Espy front bar? Walking to a gig is a boon to the inner-suburban local, eclipsed only by the walk home two feet above the pavement high on a cracking encore. But after a thigh-slapping good time and a liver-full of lager, does a cab ride home really kill you?

North or south, dark or shiny, each has its own charm. Either side of the big creek, we all wake with the same happy stamps tattooed on our inner wrists, a token of another inner suburban odyssey.

Cold comfort

Cold comfort

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/14/1120934362546.html

By Joanna Murray-Smith
July 15, 2005

I wish it was colder.

If it's going to be this cold, it may as well snow. I'd like to ski all the way down powdery Bourke Street, the real Bourke Street, from a glacial Parliament, waving gaily to the moody hot-chocolate-sippers on the Pellegrini stools. Frost is good, but ice storms would be better. Imagine the tinkling beauty of St Kilda Road, dripping frozen tears.

I've always felt this way about Melbourne. It is gloriously cold, with an ice chill that reminds me, some evenings, of Manhattan in February. In the city, at least, it's not a relentless, maudlin grey winter, like London; it's more often sharp and edgy. It's active with Antarctic breezes. And when the sun shines, steely golden rays trapped tight in refrigerated air, it's heroic and dazzling.

A genuinely magnificent winter has to have one, unnegotiable accessory: deciduous trees.

Winter's beauty is the climax of a long, slow anticipation. The city parks are our natural calendar - in autumn's beauty is the forewarning of its own vanishing.

First, the parched copper glow signifying the leave-taking of summer. Summer's over - last picnic in the park, last swim in the Fitzroy pool, last weekend surf. Then leaves fall, until only a few cling to the top boughs.

The parks have deep golden trenches. We look at the spindly trees, so frail and undressed, and order firewood. We contemplate paying to have it stacked or stacking ourselves, choosing malley roots or redgum, think snugly of real food, red wine.

Melburnians show their admiration for the cold by throwing on their hats and scarves at the earliest possible moment. At the end of summer, the first day only vaguely beneath 25 degrees, I saw three people in Brunswick Street in broad daylight wearing beanies.

There's a whisper on the streets: "Bring it on." For a fashionable city, winter is the only season, a panoply of accessories to enliven the body: scarves, hats, tights, coats, colours and layers, artistry in unlikely combinations, a Mitfordesque chic.

This is the thing: Melbourne is never more itself than in winter. It's Ultimate Melbourne. It's Melbourne doing what it does best. The rest of the year, there's always the shadow of being a bit like somewhere else: Toronto, Glasgow, Boston. It's not as sordidly pretty as Sydney, not as cultured as Berlin. But winter becomes Melbourne. It makes a virtue of its claustrophobic alleys, its inviting shadows and dark bars, its inclusion as a sport, the sitting in cafes talking about life, its predilection for fashion and food, its refusal to reveal itself in a glance.

Melbourne likes mystery, revels in anything that preserves its vague inaccessibility. The cold keeps out obviousness; it means those who find its winter soul have overcome something - a cold commute, a foggy night, a trek.

The bay is shrouded in evening mist, the first lights sparking in an arc around Beach Road, an affordable Clarice Beckett. Sea, sky, light, dark - everything is suspended in the cold, frozen between states. Container ships give comparative definition to the vast grey bay. Lone dog-walkers along Beaconsfield Parade blink back icy sea winds.

Something that I love: walking diagonally from the MCG across the Fitzroy Gardens to St Patrick's after a game. Something else that I love: tribal scarves hung jubilantly from car windows and the general good cheer that, by some miracle, football in Melbourne has hung on to. We get our heat emerging from concrete stairwells into the full, glorious tilting glow of green. We find warmth in the shambolic, rugged-up crowd. That first roar of the Melbourne fans - it's the best theatre all winter.

Every time I hear it, I always think this is what we should record and send into deep space as the symbolic voice of Earth. There are no longer prim gangs of elegant housewives in Collins Street, dressed in smart belted camel coats, heading for Georges.

When passing through the city on cold early evenings, I long for the wintry images of my childhood and before, the John Brack peakhour with its clouds of real hats and men in rain-proof trenches over their suits, passing beneath the Flinders Street clocks, locked into the bleak inevitability of salaried lives. Those images were a childhood's metronome - the regimented commutes, the dependability of fathers. In childhood winters, a trip to town meant wearing a smart coat and Mary-Janes, visiting antiquarian bookshops with dad, the volumes cataloguing warmth.

As kids, we would sit in Pellegrini's kitchen chatting to the cooks, then play bowls at the Southern Cross, with its hotel foyer just like American hotel foyers, where someone gallant was sure to meet someone glamorous, wearing a red carnation. Winter dinners in town meant meeting dad after work, wearing his dark-grey raincoat (always with a KitKat in his pocket), carrying his real brown briefcase. When things were tough, we'd eat at the Waiters' Club, and when we were flush, it was the Italian Society at the top of Bourke Street, where the little red table lamps spilled warmth into the night.

Years later, a poor student, the best winter nights were spent with my boyfriend having soup at Le Monde, over the road from where the Italian Society once was. The old French couple fed battalions of us. Later, we'd delay returning to the freezing bedrooms of rented Carlton houses by seeing a movie at the Carlton Movie House and drinking hot-chocolates at Genevieve's until we were thrown out, then trudging down Faraday Street, past Johnny's Green Room, flirting as we breathed mist.

I'd like to say I still flirt with my husband in Faraday, but more often we're flirting with domestic mayhem in a house bursting with small children with large voices. Parenthood has turned us inward.

Once, we adventured out into the wintry city, wandering down puddled, cobbled alleyways, up staircases and into clubs, where we merged with crowds insulating themselves from the cold with ecstasy and Grace Jones. Now, our nightlife is full of little, insomniacal birds - insistent chirps from under duvet clouds.

In winter, this feels right. Perhaps it's getting older, or the sheer domination of an expanding family, but winter has become more about home. Outdoors is kept for a brisk walk to school across the gardens, or for looking out my study window at football players on the oval, performing drills between tiny iridescent markers on the green. In the first glimpse of evening, grass seems lit from beneath.

I love this time of the day - day not quite lost, night not quite come, when houses take on the strongest glow of refuge. When I was young and travelling through strange cities, this time of day brought the deepest sensation of aloneness - house lights burnishing in unknown streets, summoning the belonging of others. This memory stays vigilant.

With all the wintry complaints, winter is when we realise how great it is to have somehow
collected around oneself a life: children or dogs or books, walls, a roof - a front door signifying the one place in a teeming, freezing city that seems happy to know you.

Joanna Murray-Smith is a Melbourne writer. Her novel Sunnyside will be published by Penguin in September. She will be a guest at the Melbourne Writers' Festival next month.

Confirmation at last for old convent

Confirmation at last for old convent

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/08/1120704557996.html

By Royce Millar
City Editor

July 9, 2005

The old Abbotsford Convent's long-promised new purpose in life is set to become a reality.

The long-awaited resurrection of the historic Abbotsford Convent as a cultural hub is finally under way, with the developer Australand agreeing to withdraw.

Eight years after the Kennett government gave up the convent site for apartments, the Bracks Government will today announce that land on both sides of St Heliers Street will remain in public ownership.

A car park on the northern half, until now reserved for apartments, will instead be set aside for use by the Abbotsford Convent Foundation and the Collingwood Children's Farm.

The apartment plan has long been opposed by a diverse group of residents, heritage experts, businesses and the children's farm. They feared that in a spot poorly served by public transport, the proposed convent arts complex and the farm would not work without parking.

Richmond MP Dick Wynne, who has worked for years to secure the precinct for public use, was jubilant yesterday. "This is the missing piece of the puzzle in the St Helier's convent precinct that the community has fought hard and long for," he said.

Four kilometres from the city centre, the heritage-listed convent occupies 5.6 hectares overlooking the Yarra River. Built in the mid-1880s in the style of a French medieval village, the former Convent of the Good Shepherd was run for many years as a home for wayward women.
La Trobe University quit the property in the mid-1990s.

The Abbotsford Convent Coalition was formed in 1997 after a Kennett government tender process chose Australand to develop housing on the site.

After packed public meetings, the coalition developed its own arts community and education scheme in opposition to Australand's. The plan also attracted about $2 million in philanthropic contributions.

In 2002 the Labor Government formerly backed the coalition plan by handing control of the southern site to the Community Foundation.

Under the revised plan, Australand was to build an apartment complex on the northern site, between St Heliers and Johnston streets. But the foundation and the children's farm warned that their projects were at risk if they lost access to the existing car park on Australand's northern site.

A driving force for years behind the coalition was Abbotsford resident Jo Kinross. Now living in New Zealand, Ms Kinross said she could finally celebrate after a years of minor victories and setbacks.

"The various celebrations up to this point have always felt a bit premature, but now we can all truly celebrate a victory," she said. "There aren't too many good news stories of this kind around any more."

Premier Steve Bracks said the decision on the northern site showed that the Government recognised that car parking was crucial to the precinct's success.

"The unique rural setting of the convent and the children's farm, so close to the centre of the Melbourne, is an important asset, not only for the local community but for all Victorians," he said.

But securing the convent sites has come at a cost. The Government has paid Australand $1.8 million to withdraw, and almost $8 million to VicUrban for the costs it has incurred on the site since the 1990s.

This is on top of an initial Community Support Fund grant of $4 million to help refurbish the buildings.

But the foundation's chairman, Bill Russell, also chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said the convent project was worth the investment. "It just should never have been viewed as a residential development site," he said.

This week Australand apartment manager Rob Pradolin said he had "mixed emotions" about severing its eight-year association with the site. He said he believed the apartment project would have been successful despite a downturn in the apartment market.

Frank Palomares, acting manager of the children's farm, said the decision was a breakthrough. "This means the future of the farm is secure, and we can grow and prosper," he said.

The convent is to be occupied by a Steiner School, the Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE, 3MBS classic radio, the offices of the Slow Food movement in Victoria, indoor and outdoor function spaces, restaurants, bars and artist studios.

Nostro Baretto

Nostro Baretto

http://www.theage.com.au/news/reviews/nostro-baretto/2005/07/04/1120329358986.html

By John Lethlean
July 5, 2005

So it's official.

Melbourne is pumping.

The CBD is bursting with new apartments, shops, bars and restaurants compared with four years ago, let alone 1992, when the Melbourne City Council land-use census began; we have an official MCC report to prove it.

Does this come as news to you? Of course not. Not if you've walked around Melbourne's commercial centre lately.

There are people living in dumpsters fitted with Poliform kitchens. You can buy this year's Paris pret a porter collections at Spencer Street station. The guy on the newsstand will mix you a Manhattan if you need one that early, and it's easier to get linguine with porcini in the city these days than it is to get a salad sandwich.

Yep, per capita, we have a lot of bars and restaurants in town. Maybe too many. Yet there are still people coming up with new angles, refining their ideas to wedge into a section of the market they figure isn't being serviced properly. Just when you thought you'd seen every permutation of cafe-bar-lounge-restaurant-produce store, along comes something that, while not exactly reinventing the proverbial, removes a few spokes to lighten the thing up and make it spin just a little better. Something that looks at how and where people are working and spending their leisure time, and works backwards from that.

Umberto Lallo's Nostro Baretto is a case in point. It's part of the GPO, itself a zeitgeist development representing all that is buoyant and optimistic about CBD life, targeted at the city's ever-expanding residential base as much as visitors. It's slick, modern (while embracing heritage) and aimed at a certain upwardly mobile, educated, urbane city worker-dweller-visitor.

Don't worry, they'll put up with the rest of us, too.

And Lallo, who set up King Street's Sud with Giovane Patane back in the '90s, has come up with a nice concept for Nostro Baretto - literally, our little bar. It can be many things to many people.
First, and most obvious, is the fact that it uses Postal Lane, between the GPO building and Myer, as an integral part of the floor space (as will its soon-to-open neighbours Kenzan at GPO and Ca de Vin.) Clever awnings and heating systems mean the outdoors should be useable all year round. But while Nostro's laneway real estate has the traditional tables and chairs, it also has space for standing or perching at high tables - bar-like, dare we say, in a European manner - where a person eating pasta, reading a paper and enjoying a glass of wine on their own would be perfectly at ease. It's a nice idea.

More fundamental: a lot of the food, written on ever-changing blackboards rather than printed menus, is pitched at a price point, and is simple enough to allow Nostro to wedge itself somewhere between sit-down full-service restaurant and up-market sandwich-salad place. It's territory Pellegrini's and Florentino's Cellar Bar have occupied successfully for many years.
This is an underserviced section of the market; there are plenty of city workers who earn respectable money and appreciate decent food, but for whom a proper restaurant lunch in town
would come fairly infrequently. Nostro will appeal to them.

It has unpretentious style with its distressed waxed plaster walls, towering ceilings (it was originally some sort of electrical substation), timber cabinets, old-style copper light fittings and subtle Italian flair. Being a wine-centric sort of place, the glassware is excellent, as are most of the accessories.

And the proprietor knows service, wine and food.

It's important to think about the dishes and their prices, and how each might work at that hypothetical working-day lunch. Three fat Tasmanian scallops, for example, served in their shells with a herby cauliflower-potato puree underneath and a crisp shard of pancetta on top - at $13 - are excellent, but could only be seen as part of a meal. A nice part.

Similarly, I cannot see anyone other than a sparrow getting away with just a bowl of stracciatella ($10), even if it is made with a wonderful, full-flavoured chicken stock with eggs and fresh parsley whipped into it and some chicken meat thrown in at the end, too.

On the other hand, a plate of grilled cotechino sausage slices at $13 would, with a few slices of decent bread from Laurent and a dip into the great, fruity olive oil served at Nostro, make a respectable lunch. It's good sausage, grilled so there is crispness to complement that lovely, sticky gelatinous quality that comes from making a sausage from parts of the pig you don't want to think about. I love it. It's served on braised lentils finished with a nice sweet vincotto splash - a little overcooked - and a judicious drizzle of truffle oil. It works.

As with most Italianish menus, there is pasta and risotto in the price-size territory between entrees and mains.

Which would make the braised meatballs - at $25 - a proper main course, a stand-alone dish for a hungry man or woman. For that, you get three large, dense and nicely flavoured pork and veal balls cooked in, and served with, a bright and herby tomato sugo with very good-quality mashed potato.

It's a small menu: there are just three dishes in that price region, and I'd have been happy with any of them. Or perhaps all.

For the sake of sampling, there's a side dish of grilled, soft polenta with taleggio ($7) that could work as a snack with a drink as much as a carb-loading accessory to a main. And a salad of cos and radicchio is of first-class leaves, beautifully dressed.

We also sampled zabaglione whipped with plenty of really good old Marsala, poured over fresh strawberry halves in a big glass ($9). It's jolly good. A kind of rustic apple tart is less successful: the pastry, which is a kind of semi-puff, seems a bit dry inside.

It didn't, however, taint a favourable post-prandial impression. It's a difficult time of year to open a new food and wine business, but I suspect a certain busy professional crowd that knows the difference between good Italian food and rubbish - the kind that might eat at Il Bacaro or Becco on a date, or the odd Friday lunch - will respond well to Nostro Baretto.

Despite that census-documented boom, it's the kind of place we need more of.