An exercise in myth-making

An article published in The National Times [15.02.1981].  The author of this insightful article is Kristin Williamson, married to Australian playwright, David Williamson.

The Arab

Before beatniks and cuffless trousers, when there were only three espresso machines in Victoria and LP records were rare, in 1956—the year that television came to Australia, just in time for the Melbourne Olympics—something else important was happening.  Seventy miles away, down the Great Ocean Road, “The Arab” was opening at Lorne.

It was a bit of a shock to the locals.  Lorne was a sedate resort full of guest houses where western district graziers and their families spent their annual holidays playing tennis and croquet, surfing on clumsy wooden “body boards”, being served vegetable soup, roast beef and queen pudding by waitresses in starched white caps at the Stribling’s Lorne Hotel and going to dances at the Pacific Hotel in dinner suits and taffeta.

Strange rumours were surfacing about a new cafe in the main street.  The fishermen said it had been built by odd-looking people, ‘probably New Australians’, who worked 14 hours a day in bare feet and did a lot of singing.  In fact, they were the Smith brothers, Alistair, Robin and Graham with Reno, an ebullient Italian canecutter, who’d told them all about coffee bars “on the Continent”.

The Smith brothers weren’t very old.  They lived with their parents at Cinema Point, five miles from Lorne, in a solitary cottage looking out towards the lighthouse that had once belonged to the 20s – 30s gardening guru, Edna Walling.  On a balcony far above the ocean, where the waves rolled in like slow-motion lines of circus horses, they dreamed up every detail of the Arab.

It would be built from bluestone, striped canvas, and glass, and would look like a butterfly.  It would feel like a circus, with scaffolding covered in tiny blue globes that shone like jugglers’ balls in the dark.

There would be little round tables on the footpath, a 20-foot surfboard with “Arab” written large on it, standing outside.  There would be huge flat wicker baskets full of real fruit that anyone could steal and which, as they revolved slowly, would make eerie shadows to the amplified sound of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite.

The kitchen would be a long open passage right in the middle of the restaurant so that the customers could see everything that was happening and feel part of the place.  The staff would be young and tanned and would wear striped things.  They would be the floor show.  They would come out from behind the counter and invite people in off the street.  They would even feed them spaghetti.

The Arab was a fantasy world.  There were sundaes called Harem Girls with astonishing nipples made of strawberries, and strong cappuccino that was said to be a drug.  Once you’d had one, you needed another.

If you peered into the depths of The Arab, you could see the decadent part, “the snake pit” up the back, where people were sprawled on cushions around low cane tables with sophisticated first-year university students discussing Plato’s Republic.  If you lay down up there, it was said, you’d never get up.

What was most wonderful about the boys’ concept for The Arab wasn’t the music or the atmosphere, or even the food—it was the waitresses.  They weren’t exactly glamorous, but they were slim, suntanned and confident.  Natural.  They laughed a lot, had genteel accents and wore nothing but bikinis.

They tucked roses into their buttocks on special occasions, like New Year’s Eve.  No one ever dared to pinch their bottoms.  Every boy who entered the place fell in love with at least one Arab waitress, and every girl longed to become one.

Hundreds of girls would write to the Smith brothers during the year asking for a job.  In November, just before the season, they would be interviewed in their parents’ homes with the parents present.  The Smiths didn’t want any embarrassing scenes with waitresses being dragged out by irate fathers who didn’t understand what the Arab was about.

It might look like a den of vice, but it was, in fact, rather moral, they explained.  “The girls have to look so innocent that most boys won’t dare ask them out, just keep coming back to The Arab and yearning for them,” said Alistair, who was always practical.

The Smith brothers were charming.  Boyish, extroverted and charismatic.  Most parents had no hesitation entrusting their well-brought-up daughters to them for a six-week season at Lorne.  The girls, they were assured, would live together in a pretty cottage decorated by Mrs Smith.

“Fiona will be driven back there every night after work, either by Alistair or me.” Robin would say earnestly.  And she usually was.  With her hair blowing wildly in the back of a white Sunbeam Talbot sports car as the sun was rising—like Isadora Duncan [minus the scarf]— and yelling above the wind about the dance of the seven veils she’d just performed up the back of The Arab in three tea towels.

The Arab was unabashedly sexist, but in those days, no one knew what sexism was, so it didn’t matter.  “If a girl is beautiful enough, we must have her, no matter how dreadful a waitress she is,” Graham Smith advised his younger brothers.

Before they opened The Arab, Alistair had been a carpenter, Robin worked in a bank, and Graham was a principal dancer with the Munich Opera House.  When he was away on tour, the plans for colour schemes, music, menus and lighting were discussed in 20-page letters from London, New York and Peking.

“Graham was the visionary.  He put the magic into the building and what went on in there,” said Robin, 25 years later.  “Alistair provided the dynamism.  He was a perfectionist.  Sometimes he threw tantrums and did his block, which the customers loved.”  And Robin?  Today he looks more tired than the others who, like Dorian Gray, don’t seem to have changed at all.  “Robin pulled the threads together, negotiated with the banks and the police.  He was the diplomat.  He did the late shift and worked the longest hours”, said Helen, his wife, who’d worked there, too.

The Arab never closed in the summer, except for an hour or so at dawn when the chairs, tables and cushions would be taken out into the street while the whole place was hosed.  Even then, some people wouldn’t leave.

“When it was completely bare and covered in an inch of water, they’d come in and order toasted raisin bread,” said Robin.  “Then, as the sun came up, the ground would start to move like a slow volcano as they came crawling up from sleeping on the beach for their breakfast of Brubeck ham rolls and tomato juice.”

You couldn’t keep them out of The Arab.  It was about the size of two buses, but it served two thousand people a day and went through 70 gallons of milk daily.

“Jaguars and Citroens pile up outside The Arab while fond mamas try to coax their student waitress daughters back to a life of orthodoxy,” claimed one breathless magazine in 1961.  “Life at The Arab is never, ever dull … The Arab seems to ‘send’ even the squares.”  Soon, not only magazine people but also models, sportsmen, foreign journalists, and TV crew girls came to The Arab.  It had become a “trendy” place before the word had even been invented.

It was the days before big jets, when anything other than Fletcher Jones trousers, Smokey Dawson and meat pies was considered exotic.  Here was a place that offered a smattering of styles.  Italian cafe society mixed with the American beat scene and a novel bit of Australiana, perving on near-naked and unattainable beach girls.

The Smiths had hit a fashion nerve.  They were trapped in their own myth, and it would take almost two decades for them to extricate themselves.  But at that stage, they were still refreshingly naive.

In the first years, thousands of people left The Arab without paying. “We’d find this confetti on each table … torn-up bills,” said Alistair.  Many people ripped them off as part of the beat culture.  Materialism was stupid. But they still managed to make a profit.  Wages were low.  “The girls worked for six shillings an hour, sometimes for sixteen hours at a stretch,” said Robin.  “It was a total commitment if you worked at The Arab.  You felt guilty sitting on the beach.”

The girls admitted they’d rather work an extra shift than go out with some boy.  They weren’t very interested in some grazier’s sons and first-year university students and surf lifesavers after the sophisticated men they worked with.

There was Georgie, the Greek dishwasher who comforted them when Alistair shouted.  Radu, the suave waiter, who’d been a Captain in the Romanian Army and Reno, who was a philosopher as well as a cook and a charmer.  “No man should have one woman to himself,” he would say.  “He should have three.  Anything can happen to one”.

And, of course, there were the musicians who played at The Arab.  Hairy folksingers like Paul Marks and Brian Mooney, Jazz singers like Frank Traynor … and, once, the whole American cast of West Side Story, some of whom were black.  It was heady stuff.  Occasionally, the surf lifesavers got mad about being displaced in the affection of good-looking girls by pimply white folksingers in duffel coats and would come into The Arab in large, aggressive groups, bending chair legs and crushing sugar bowls.  Still, somehow Alistair always managed to defuse the situation with good humour, and eventually the trouble stopped.

If The Arab made the mistake of alienating some people, it was quick to try and win back their affection.  Everyone stole Arab menus.  They were supposed to.  Ten thousand were pinched in one six-week season.  It was a good advertisement for the place and a good excuse to put out different menus the following year.  There was hardly any food on them, just spaghetti, coffee, sandwiches and sundaes, but it was described in “beat” poetry, so it sounded irresistible.

“Porgy and Bess”

 … chocolate and coffee, set like Belafonte to Gershwin with nuts, ice cream, cream, and rum … 3 shillings and 6 pence

But if the Porgy and Bess was a racist sundae, the “Harem Girl” was certainly sexist.

 “Harem Girl”

… this lady is all strawberries and cream and ice-cream, maybe your tongue is a leopard skin rug today, no lady is better on leopard … 4 shillings

But things did begin to change at The Arab.  The Health Department banned bikini-clad waitresses.  They were unhygienic.  One of their fathers, a professor of microbiology, suggested they should all be sprayed.

“Join our crazy hygienically-misted staff next year”, the menu bulletin suggested.  But it was no use.  They had to wear uniforms.  The Arab dressed its staff in striped butcher’s aprons, and a decade later, most trendy Australian restaurants followed suit.

Inside The Arab 1963, on the left John Agar.

The Wild Colonial Club

When the Smith brothers had made enough money out of The Arab, they poured it into the Wild Colonial—a great barn of a place on the beachfront that was once the town’s ‘talking pictures’ theatre.  Inside, they built a “Gone with the Wind” staircase. “Graham measured treads all over Paris until we got perfection,” said Alistair.  “We knew that when the girls walked down, they would feel good, and then the boys would follow.”

Behind the staircase was a jungle gym scaffold, cast iron with a gold background.  Like a skeleton of the convict past, it was hung with rusty chains, shackles and machinery—a giant theatre with spot-lit platforms. “We put in a long-haired group with electric guitars called the Spinning Wheels.  They performed as well as played,” said Alistair.  “People just danced themselves to pieces.”

The Smiths let the Wild Colonial look like it was in opposition to The Arab, but they knew that pretty soon people would be wearing a track three feet deep between the two places, and they were right. On the back of The Arab menu, Graham composed some “beat” lines on dreaming up a yellow Wild Colonial Club while dancing in Paris.

“This was revolution, and Madame Guillotine was kissing the back of my neck, the Pareejuenes kept up their Cancan, and the garçon supplied the French word for yellow.  We were going colonial, and I was in pain … that was remembering and great-grandfathers and ancestor worship.  ‘Mother, when can I have a ball and chain like yours?’  We were sieving the past like panning for gold and deciding how dead was Ned.”

It sounds pseudo, even twee today, but in 1960 it was an effective way of introducing an extraordinary new idea—to start a disco that celebrated our convict past.

Later came The Abominable, a licensed restaurant in the snowfields at Mt Buller.  Some of the best bands in the country played there, but like The Arab, the real floor show was the staff. What kept the Smith brothers going at such a pace for almost 20 years?  What kept their spirits high? “It was definitely an ego trip,” said Alistair. “We thought we were important. It wasn’t till later that we found out we weren’t.  It sounds corny now, but we believed in what we were doing, and so did the customers. They helped us. Some of them were really lovable.  One old man used to hitchhike 60 miles every night just to sit there and be part of The Arab.

Steve Politis owns The Arab now.  He came to work there 15 years ago and didn’t like it. “I was a city boy, a real Greek guy with my hair slicked up, you know, with grease, and I wore a bow tie.  I had to work three times as hard at The Arab, but the atmosphere was so good, so easy go, I didn’t mind.  After three weeks, you couldn’t push me out with a bomb.”

Jim Vasilopoulos is back working there, too.  He started as a dishwasher in 1959.  His eyes light up when he describes the old days. “If Robin told me, ‘I can’t pay you,’ I would work for nothing, unlike now.  Then it was a big thing to work here.  I came back and was a bit disappointed, but you always want to keep in touch with a place you love … that back part, in the tent with blue and white stripes.  When the sun was shining, it was so beautiful.  Like a picture.”

It was time to change.  The demand for just coffee and spaghetti was over.  Now, the Arab has a BYO licence and serves veal cordon bleu and oysters kilpatrick.  The music is disco, there are vinyl chairs and high square tables, and the waitresses are quite normal.  It is still very friendly, but the magic is gone. Sitting outside in the sun last week, I met one of the graziers’ sons who went to The Arab 20 years ago.  He was 42, quite grey, and had his own teenage daughters.  “I met my wife on the cushions at the back of The Arab,” he said. I should have guessed he was out of the past because he was nostalgically eating toasted ham sandwiches with tomato juice.

“I bring my kids here, bore them with stories about how this place was.”  He admitted he’d thrown a rock at the chemist’s window next door to The Arab on New Year’s Eve.  But that was traditional. “There was a whole generation that believed in the myth of The Arab,” he said.  “It punctuated everything that happened at Lorne.  When the projector broke down in the picture theatre, everyone would chant ‘Spaghetti, spaghetti, spaghetti,’ just the way they wrote it on The Arab menu.  Remember?

“And when it hailed and thundered just as the crowd was getting out of the pictures, there’d be ‘The Arab taxi,’ two waiters in tea towels with umbrellas to run you a couple of hundred yards to The Arab,” I’d forgotten. “If you turned most of the kids in Lorne upside down and shook them in 1962, you’d only find a shilling or two, but you could be sure The Arab would get it,” he said with a sad smile.

What happened to the Smith brothers’ dream?  Time just caught up with it.  Twenty years ago, they introduced the style Australians were hungry for.  What they created looked experimental and bold.  They had the insight to realise what was important in its time, but ephemeral.  So, they got out.  They didn’t retire rich.  In fact, none of them owns anything at all. “There was a point where money became too important,” said Robin.  “So that was the end of it.”

Alistair lives in Carlton and runs factory workshops for school kids “not good at blackboard work”, who, without such skills, mostly end up in jail. Graham decorates apartments for rich people in New York. And Robin? … at the time of writing [1981], Robin is back in Lorne, working temporarily as a hotel cook.

Article by Kristin Williamson
Edited by John Agar