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“Are you going to see the Christmas windows?” Mum always asked if anyone was going into town at any point in December. It was a rhetorical question, of course, because the answer was always “yes”.
My mother grew up in the heyday of Sydney’s past, the child of a World War II veteran who moved his family into a brand-new house in what was then, in the booming post-war 1950s, the suburban fringe of the city.
Every Christmas we would go to what we called “the Christmas house” to spend the season with our grandparents. And every year my grandfather would pack his “girls” – my grandmother, mother, sister and me – off for a day shopping in the city.
The train trip from Wahroonga along the North Shore line seemed to take forever in the summer humidity before we would hop off at St James station and cross Elizabeth Street. Pushing against the heavy gilt-edged doors of David Jones was like fighting through the fur coats in the back of the wardrobe that lead to Narnia.
There were the counters of makeup and accessories, patrolled not by fauns but elegant women who knew what to do with mascara and how to tie a scarf. The charming gentleman who played the grand piano always seemed to have a twinkle in his eye, a smile and a trill of the keys with a riff from Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music as we walked in.
Up the escalators we would glide as our mother and grandmother looked for the necessities. Fresh socks for us and stockings for them, definitely; a present for a relative, perhaps; the trying on of a new frock, always.
Back at home in Canberra the main David Jones was in the city. In those change rooms I bought my first bra. My mother handed me and the process over to the sales ladies. In what would now be considered a lawsuit-in-waiting they loudly knocked on the change room door before bustling in, suspiciously eyed my clumsy attempts to fasten eyes and hooks and then took charge, pulling, tugging, adjusting until they considered all items to be sufficiently secured. Today’s young women could not imagine such service; they would, no doubt, have other words for the experience.
Years later, as a cub reporter working on the 27th floor of the Herald ’s Sussex Street office, it was only a brisk walk up the hill before I could sink into the air-conditioned glamour of the same Elizabeth Street store for what I still like to refer to as a “power shop” – a quick less-than-an-hour tour of my favourite brands and designers to see if the racks held the outfit that would transform me, Disney princess-like, into the heroine of my own life.
If it had been a particularly trying day one could always skip out of the train station into the Bondi Junction store’s food hall for a take-home dinner for one before jumping on the 380 bus and chugging down Bondi Road to my flat. The flat included a David Jones brand dinner set I bought when I first moved out of home. I’ve still got two of the plates, going strong well over 25 years later.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug but not powerful enough to make me loyal. Not loyal enough to make the trip into the city to buy my sheets or a present for my father-in-law when it is so much more convenient to do it online and have it delivered to my house or, even better, straight to the recipient’s house.
Life has sped up and our choices have exploded. A destination department store, no matter how nice the bathrooms, doesn’t seem like enough for all the goods we are told we need to present our best selves to a world in which optimisation reins.
I know I have been part of the problem that has led to the sounding of the death knell for this 188-year-old institution . I know I’m not going to do anything about it. Not enough anyway. And it’s too late, its demise brought on by people like me who feel sad about losing the portal back to another time.
It’s too soon to have to tell my children, “There was no other store like David Jones”.
Stephanie Peatling is the Herald ’s deputy federal editor.
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