Peter Andrew Barrett - Architectural and Urban Historian, Writer & Curator

Craig Williamson (Craigs) Department Store
8-32 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne

With origins that date back to the mid-nineteenth century as a wholesale drapery business, Craig Williamson Pty Ltd later expanded into retailing to become one of the city’s largest department stores. Surviving a devastating fire in 1897 which destroyed the store and that spread to destroy much of this block of the city, Craig Williamson rebuilt and expanded its premises to have a 67 metres frontage to Elizabeth Street.

Craig Williamson was purchased in 1926 by the Sydney-based retailer Marcus Clark & Co. By this time, Craig Williamson was already struggling to compete with competition by other, newer, and more innovative department stores that had established further north in the city on Bourke Street such as Myer. Even the year before its closure in 1937, Craig Williamson had undertaken efforts to update the store to attract shoppers. The closure of Craig Williamson was a precursor to the demise of other retailers closer to Flinders Street in the post war period including Sydney Snow (Snows), Mutual Store, and Ball & Welch.

Craig Williamson’s Elizabeth Street site was redeveloped after the store’s closure. The last section of the store built, completed in 1926 (the portion visible at left with Craig's signage), was gutted and had its façade remodelled by ANA (Australian Natives Association) and became their headquarters. The remodelled building still exists and is known to many for its ornamentation of Australian flora and fauna that adorns its facade. In its altered state this building as part of the former Craig Williamson store is a ghost of sorts of this once great retailer, this last remaining portion a tangible link to it. The remainder of the Craig Williamson site further south in Elizabeth Street, and the Finks Building at the corner of Flinders Street, was redeveloped by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in the 1960s. This development in turn has been remodelled and added to in recent decades.

Source of Photograph: State Library of Victoria

Federal Building
Collins Street, Melbourne
c1968

This is a view of the south side of Collins Street, between King and Spencer streets, in the late 1960s. The Federal Building has a broad frontage and was built as an office and warehouse for the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency Company in 1883.

Designed by the eminent architect, Lloyd Taylor, the building extended a city block in depth to Flinders Lane. It was claimed by the Age, at the time of its construction, to be the largest private building in Australia. Taylor designed the grand façade of the building with large proportions, large areas of fenestration and fine detailing. The entrance columns and piers are vermiculated, that is they are expressed with wavy and irregular lines that look a little like they are worm eaten.

The building was renamed the Federal Building after it was purchased by the adjacent Federal Hotel in 1946. The Federal Hotel, formerly the Federal Coffee Palace, is partially visible at left in the photograph. The hotel intended at that time to redevelop both sites with a new hotel complex, but this was never realised. By the 1960s, the large ornate parapet of the Federal Building had had its ornamentation removed, and its pronounced cornice concealed by steel cladding, diminishing the detailing of the façade.

As seen in this photograph the Federal Building gave this portion of Collins Street a distinct air of sophistication, a degree of urbanity more commonly associated with the Paris End of Collins Street than its western end of mercantile uses, warehousing and shipping concerns. Sadly, both the Federal Building and the Federal Hotel were demolished. For many years the broad site of the Federal Building was a hole in ground, used for car parking for decades. Visible at that time were some of its basement walls that remained along the Collins Street frontage of the site. It remained that way until the existing building on its former site was completed in 2015.

Source of photograph: State Library of Victoria

National Mutual Life Association Building – take a squiz
395 Collins Street, Melbourne

Situated at the southwest corner of the intersection of Collins and Queen streets, this building was erected for the former insurance giant, the National Mutual Life Association. It is an example of the first generation of multi-level buildings in Melbourne, which, built in the 1880s and 1890s, dwarfed earlier city office buildings that tended to be of a two-to-three storey scale.

What sets the National Mutual building apart from other early multi-level buildings of the late nineteenth century is that it is designed in a Gothic-style (pointed arches). Whereas, most other of these multi-level buildings used a Classical styling (round-headed arches and/or Italianate detailing).

This building, on its completion in 1893, had a short frontage to Queen Street of only 15 metres. Additions to the building c1913, designed by the architect Gibb and Finlay, extended the Queen Street frontage to 36.5 metres, and in a manner that complemented the design of the original corner portion that was designed by the Adelaide architects, Wright Reed & Beaver. In 1914, one newspaper listed this building’s arched entrance in Collins Street as one of the city's most notable (see photograph).

This building coincides, if not demonstrates, the success and growth of the National Mutual Life Association as a financial institution in the early twentieth century. Other firms let space in the building, attracted by the prestige of the building's owner, and its location at the intersection of Collins and Queen streets at what is traditionally considered the centre of Melbourne’s financial district.

This building’s prestige did not go unnoticed by one of Melbourne’s notorious crime figures, Joseph Leslie (Squizzy) Taylor. In 1926, a police informant tipped off the police that Squizzy Taylor and his men were going to blow open an office safe in the building. Police staked out the building and observed Taylor’s men loitering in Queen Street and the doorway of the National Mutual Building. Taylor waited in his Buick parked in Queen Street. They arrested Taylor and his men and Taylor’s defence was he was in Queen Street to meet two girls. The charges were later dismissed in court.

The National Mutual Life Association moved from this building in the mid 1960s, when it relocated to the purpose-built National Mutual Centre on the site of the former Western Market, further west in Collins Street. National Mutual was delisted after being purchased by the French insurer AXA in the 1990s. The National Mutual Centre has since been demolished, its site redeveloped.

This former building of the National Mutual Life Association at the corner of Collins & Queen streets is a tangible link to this once large insurance company, and is a valuable part of Melbourne's architectural heritage. It also provides a tangible link to a chapter of the life and crimes of Melbourne’s most infamous gangster of the 1920s, Squizzy Taylor.

Photographer (Building): J T Collins
Source of Photograph: State Library of VictoriaDate of Photograph c1965.

Source of Photograph (Squizzy Taylor):
Public Records Office Victoria