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Department Store, Martoo’s and Colthups furniture store.
The Old Flour Mill housed the Cribb and Foote stove department.
Greek immigrants were already a part of Ipswich’s business
community from the early 1900s. Ipswich’s first Greek owned
oyster saloon/café Australia Café is thought to have opened in 1901
on Brisbane Street. With the boom in immigration after WWII, a
whole range of other businesses joined Ipswich’s CBD including
more Greek cafés which rapidly became part of the city’s identity.
During the 1940s and 1950s, a least ten Greek cafés were thought to
be trading as well as other Greek businesses such as milk bars and
fruit shops. Londys is often remembered as the finest of the cafés
with an Easter Egg display each year that became a tourist
attraction in its own right. Over time the cafés slowly disappeared
from Ipswich’s cityscape as younger generations drifted towards
bigger cities in search of educational and employment
opportunities. However, the memory of the café culture of fifty
years ago is being revisited now with the opening of many new
coffee shops in the Ipswich CBD and Top of Town Precinct.
Ipswich is once again enjoying the café experience.
Cribb and Foote
, having opened its doors in 1849, became Reid’s
department store in the 1970s and remained the heart of the
Ipswich CBD until one awful morning. Early on Saturday 17 August
1985, Reid’s burned down. This act of arson changed the centre of
Ipswich for decades. The department store had not only been a
retail focal point for Ipswich shoppers for 130 years, but it also
formed a meeting place for school students, was an employer for
lift operators and shop assistants and most importantly, was part of
the fabric of Ipswich itself. Its fashion parades and cages of singing
19
Marina Londy (left) from Londy’s Cafe in Ipswich visits the nearby Regal Cafe after school in 1952. George Kentrotis
stands proudly behind the Regal’s confectionary counter with two of his brothers, two other male relatives, and two
Anglo-Australian female staff. Courtesy of Vasi Kentrotis.
Coal Cutting