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and its principals never made that
blunder again! Actually, blunder
was an understatement. On that
particular Saturday morning at
10 am, before the usual morning
matinee got underway for the
youngsters, in the area around the
Town Hall, Collins Street and
Swanston Street were thousands of
little girls in short skirts, tap shoes
and hair curled up to look like
Shirley Temple, all clutching on to
their mums. It was pandemonium -
traffic was diverted, trams were
held up, extra police rode up on
pushbikes (yes, pushbikes), but the
boys had seen enough and went in
to watch Tom Mix and his horse
Tony, together with the comedies
and serials. During the interval, the
theatre manager led some poor little
girl onto the stage and she was
deemed the winner of the Shirley
Temple contest. Both the child and
her mother looked as though they
had spent a few hours in a blizzard,
but they perked up when they were
handed a five pound note and two
Shirley Temple frocks from
Darrods as the winner.
More images of the Plaza Theatre, located below the Regent The Regent never put on a bunfight like that
again. I often wonder what happened to all
those little Shirley Temple look-alikes!

Part of this wondrous entertainment scene was
the Plaza Theatre, which was underneath the
Regent. You walked down numerous marble
steps, purchased your ticket, walked down more
marble steps to the foyer, but by this time you
were starting to think you were in a Moorish
courtyard in Morocco, or an Algerian castle in
the Middle Ages. It was really an exciting, eerie
sensation. Cascading waterfalls, Spanish and
Moorish draperies fluttering gently from
ceilings, mysterious grotto, tanks of lazy
tropical fish gliding past, all filled pop-eyed
patrons with awe just being in this vast
underground Mecca of mesmerising mystery.

Quite frankly, the delightful foyer of the Plaza
in the 1930s was literally a fantasy to all us boys
and girls, which our humdrum lives of poverty
had never encountered, and we simply loved
the beauty and appeal of the Plaza all our lives.
All sorts of Melburnians loved and treasured
and respected that beautiful Plaza foyer, and
even our finny friends in the fish tanks seemed
to zoom about their tanks for the delight of the
patrons.
Escorted to your seat by dazzling sirens in
burgundy gowns was all part of the Plaza
panache, and if the patrons of the 30s, 40s, and
50s never remembered any other fact, one thing
they would never forget was “the seat” in the
Plaza. As you sat in the seat, a leather cushion
emitted a “sigh of ecstasy”, and the patron
followed suit, for it was a heavenly feeling to
sink back into that slowly subsiding seat. I bet
old-timers still recall that whoosh!

A few words about Hillier's. It was adjacent to
both theatres, in Regent Place. In Melbourne in
those days, it was a type of holy word. It sold
the world"s most wonderful milk drinks, and

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