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I’m told that admitting you are upset about the demise of David Jones is an admission that you are middle class. Well, maybe.
Then again, I have a nostalgic regard for many icons of the past. Not all are posh. Aside from David Jones, they include Chiko Rolls, Alpine cigarettes when stored by a young female friend in the space between her arm muscle and her T-shirt, and KB beer (providing it was being derided as “Kids’ Beer”, on account of its sweetness).
And when it comes to David Jones, I have the experience of being a middle-class shopper but also one of the workers. I don’t want to overstate my claim to fame. I won’t be claiming a late-issue redundancy payment from the receiver. I was there for months, not years.
All the same, in 1980, when I was attempting to convince the University of Sydney that I deserved a history degree, I worked part-time as a lift operator at David Jones’ Market Street store. I was required to operate the antique machinery and to simultaneously intone the usual catechism: “Ground floor: perfumery, stationery and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food. Going up …”
Actually, those are the words of the lift operator in Are You Being Served? Our floors were a little different, but I can’t remember. My point: across continents, department stores were famous and so were their lift operators.
My fellow Herald writer Peter FitzSimons, when offering his own recollections about the demise of DJs, made special mention of we lift operators. The lift, he wrote, “came complete with an old attendant with a peaked cap and crimson uniform. There were no buttons in the lift to denote floors and instead this kindly old fellow had his hand on a dial like the one used on the bridge of a ship – full steam ahead, steady astern, etc – to get it moving. And as it stopped at each level, he would portentously make announcements. ‘Children’s wear, shoes, toys … Dining, kitchen and bridal wear… Women’s designer fashion, men’s formal wear ...’ And so on.”
Well, of course, I take offence at Pete’s “kindly old fellow”. I was, and am, only three years older than Fitz. In fact, my main problem with the job was the older male customers. We were required to laugh at their jokes. Sorry, I should have said: “We were required to laugh at their joke.”
Every time it would be the same. An old chap would hop into the lift. His lips would start twitching as he readied the witticism, and then it would come, somewhere between first floor (women’s etc) and third floor (kitchen’s etc).
“Well, son, I’m guessing this is a pretty up and down sort of job.”
Dutiful employee, that was me, I would chortle away as if comedy itself had reached a new plateau. After this, the fellow would exit the lift full of cheer, with a desire to spend as much time and money as possible. The business pages of this newspaper are full of analysis of why DJs finally came unstuck, but none have mentioned the obvious: the departure of the lift operators and our readiness to laugh at “the joke”.
Working all day inside the lift, I was also aware that for many customers David Jones meant only one thing: bras. Later in life, this was confirmed. When I mentioned my lift-operator job to female friends, their memories of DJs were always connected to that one department.
They’d recount how they’d been dragged in there by their mothers because David Jones supposedly had the best bra-fitters. These were no-nonsense women who would grab the breasts of the terrified teenage girl, assess their weight and shape, before they issued a first bra.
I remember asking: “Did they do a good job?” “Who knows,” would be the reply, “I was just mortified that I had breasts in the first place.”
Later still, I had my own experience of the glory days of David Jones. I’d started going on TV for five minutes a week – 7’s Sunrise program – and I needed a proper suit so I looked OK next to Kochie. I went to DJs and, Anglophile that I am, I was attracted to a display of suits by some young British designer. They were what one might call “slim-fit”.
A DJs sales assistant, a woman of a certain age, appraised my appearance as I stood there with my chosen slim-fit suit on its hanger. “We often find,” she said, “that these British suits are not built for our broad Australian shoulders.”
She never called me fat. She never said, “Mate, you’ve let yourself go.” But, when I walked out that afternoon, I was holding a suit which fitted me. And my ego was still intact. What a glorious woman.
Is it any surprise the David Jones business has failed? The positive suit lady, that woman with the talent for bare-faced lies, is no longer there. The brusque bra-fitters with their rough, breast-appraising hands, are no longer there. And nor are the lift guys, with our willingness to laugh at a joke we have heard 4000 times before.
I mourn them all. Although, speaking for myself, it certainly was an up and down sort of job.
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