Gaylene Preston at home, 2007. Photographer: Sarah Burton
Gaylene Preston first came to live in Mt Victoria in 1978, buying an old house with her partner. “I had $500 and he had $500 and with this princely deposit we managed to buy No. 26 Roxburgh Street. The house at this point was on a six-inch lean. Its piles were completely stuffed and it was under water along one side.”
“My first feature film, Mr Wrong, was shot here in Mt Vic . . . Mr Wrong is about a woman who buys a haunted car and the woman who buys the car, she’s got a flat in Mt Victoria – funnily enough, in Roxburgh Street. . . . In 1985 I was traveling around with it overseas, and especially in America you’d sit in a cinema and there’s a shot that comes up in the credit sequence where the car comes down Brougham Street and around Elizabeth. It’s a stacked-up shot and it’s got all these telegraph poles and these lovely little houses, and people would go ‘Oh!’ like that, when they saw Mt Victoria on the screen.”
“We never had much money to make that film and the composer, Jonathan Crayford, had been encouraged to accept the star vehicle – the Jaguar, that’s in Mr Wrong – the haunted car, in other words – as his fee. Jonathan was living with me by the time we finished the film so the car was parked outside the house. People would go to the paramount, get completely spooked out by the film (which is a comedy thriller) and then there’d be little bands of people who would come up Roxburgh Street after the cinema and look at the Jag; and then they’d go up – especially on moonlit nights – and look at the location.”
The mountain itself is special. “It’s a fantastic playground for film-markers up there. . . Also, if you’re shooting a period piece, you want to be somewhere where, when you see the houses in the distance, you can’t see the changes in them. So Mt Vic’s good; you can throw them out of focus . . . It’s getting harder and harder to find streetscapes where you could shoot period. I look around Mt Victoria now and I think, mmm, interesting – not as easy.”
Less momentous films were also made in Mt Victoria. “There was a dairy that is still there on Majoribanks Street and we got to know the dairy owners quite well.” Ishtar ran the dairy and at one time his father had to go into hospital for a minor operation. “But while he was in hospital the old man tasted poached eggs for the first time and he’d never had poached eggs before. So when I went down there to the dairy Ishtar said to me ‘How do you poach an egg? You’d know. How do you poach an egg?’ And I said, well, you know, I started explaining and I said, ‘Look. We’ll write out the recipe.’ And I went home and Jonathan and I got out my video camera, which was one of the first, big, clanky video cameras that had a separate recorder and a camera, and we made this video for the Indian diary owner’s family of how to poach an egg. And after that we had a very good supply of Bollywood videos.”
“I’ve found to my surprise . . . that by staying in one place you can also experience huge change. And for me most of that change has been brilliant and for the better. I miss not having a butcher shop down the road and all of that sort of thing, but I love being able to duck down to Sweet Mothers . . . I can go to Sweet Mothers at three o’clock in the morning and get a cocktail there or I can go down there at eight o’clock in the morning and have breakfast. In fact, I can go down there and have breakfast at three o’clock in the morning with a cocktail.”
“And in the olden days, when there was only Continental Cakes and Courtenay Place closed at 5.30, there was always Roy’s. Roy’s was down at the bottom – it was by where Bats is – and Roy’s was open twenty-four hours. I remember, when I was giving up smoking . . . and I got it so I could manage with just one cigarette a day. So my first cigarette a day was also my last cigarette a day and I had it when I went to bed. (So it was the worst thing to be doing.) But one time I could not find a cigarette, so I went downstairs, I put my coat on over my nightie and – it was a bit of a southerly blowing – I whipped down through the underground tunnel (there’s a tunnel by the hotel car park straight across the road from 26 Roxburgh Street). So I ducked down there, through the tunnel, round to Roy’s, got my fags, ran up and got back into bed to have my cigarette.”
“In some ways, if you consider the big change on Mt Victoria has been the difference in the cost of 26 Roxburgh Street actually (because . . . in the end it’s still a little two-up and two-down house with the same aspect) and it’s gone from being worth $16,000 to being, I don’t know, six or seven hundred thousand, probably more – when you consider that, the population of Mt Vic hasn’t changed as much as you’d expect.” Gaylene hopes it doesn’t lose its variety and colour.
Gaylene in the 1970s.
Gaylene’s montage of the silver Jag from ‘Mr Wrong’, parked in Roxburgh Street.
Gaylene at 26 Roxburgh Street.