Page 19 - CR31R.pdf

once would have loomed above them).
The Barkly Theatre in Footscray wasn’t
exceptional. Much more of a real picture
palace it may have been compared with
some of the seedy cinemas of my
teenage acquaintance. But only one of
many in which the lights went out in the
years after television came in 1956 to
eclipse forever our cinema-going world
we had known before.
How many have you seen fall? In Above: The vandalised
the first decade after television there auditorium of The Barkly
were almost too many to count, when Theatre Footscray.
Australia lost well over half of its Photo: Roger Seccombe.
cinemas to the wreckers. With their Above left: The derelict
passing our streetscapes were changed, upstairs foyer of the
sometimes beyond recognition. Cinema Barkly Theatre.
manager Ian McCann said to me, as he Right: The remains of the
drove around Melbourne, it was as Barkly’s fly tower after a
though something special, like an old fierce storm.
friend, had gone from the familiar Photos: Kevin Adams.
world. Where once his favourite picture
palaces stood, now there were
supermarkets and service stations or believe, in the middle 1940s. It must twisted, mangled steel and blackened
just a large empty blank. have been as a small child that I first bricks that was the Maling in
My first memory of the death of a walked past with my mother up the Canterbury, the first theatre to which I
cinema was of the old Rivoli in Burke narrow adjoining lane to the had ventured without adult supervision
Road, Camberwell: a cavernous, Camberwell Market. Over half a in my youthful passion for cinema way
blackened brick skeleton, still reeking century later the sight and the smells of back around 1948 or 1949.
of fire and destruction, burnt down, I the devastated Rivoli still haunt me! Only quite recently I saw the old
They came back Clifton Theatre fall to the wreckers’
again to me today, hammers. I’d last visited the Clifton in
looking at the Barkly November 1961 when it was popularly
Theatre in Footscray. known as Franco Ricco’s Clifton
It’s hard to eradicate Theatre. I’d gone to see Vittorio de
experiences like Sica in The Secret of General Della
these. Later, much Rovere in the company of a horde of
later than the Rivoli, local noisy Italians. It may not have
I looked at the empty been such a fancy suburban cinema but
concrete shell where it too held within it some piece of my
once stood my passion for film. I can’t venture down
favourite Grosvenor the old gutted “tunnel of love” that
in Little Collins once led to the Prince George in
Street. For me, it was Brighton without momentarily
the home of British becoming again an anxious teenager,
cinema! Or the far from home, eagerly in quest of

Right: Angelique
was the last
film to screen
at The Tivoli in
Melbourne.

CINEMARECORD Spring 2001 19