4 June 2024

This delightful thing once stood on the corner of Acland Street and the Esplanade in St Kilda, where there’s now McDonald’s, and had quite a varied history. It was built as the Green Knoll Cafe in 1917, to a design by Gibbs & Finlay, with multiple domes joining those on the Sea Baths and Luna Park, for the Prahran and Malvern Tramway Trust. They bought the long vacant site in order to run a loop around it for the new electric lines along Carlisle Street and into the eastern suburbs. It was probably a popular place amongst the booming leisure activities of interwar St Kilda – I found a reference to a party in 1933 going till 1.30 am, with plenty of beer. Around 1950 it became more of a nightclub called the Katrina Cafe, hosting jazz bands, renamed in 1957 Jazz Centre 44, a major hipster hang out until the late 60s. In 1970 John and Joy Pittman thought a Wax Museum would be a goer, opening with 45 figures of various famous identities, including ‘Deadly Earnest’ who hosted horror movies on Channel 0/TEN (I never saw that, but I do have vague childhood memories of seeing that there was a wax works, too scary !). It wasn’t much of a success and moved to Echuca in 1976 and then 30 years later to the Gold Coast. So it was probably the late 70s it was demolished by McDonald’s, quite sad when they could’ve just reused it. Info from a bit of Trove, and Facebook posts on the jazz history by Tony Beyer, and of the waxworks by Simon Reeves, hopefully accurate. Most pics also from them, second last pic from the @nationaltrustvic.

Facebook comment from Pail McCluskey :

it was scary but fun, the torture chamber was creepy, it did remind me of the vincent price film ‘The house of wax’. There were historical tableaus, but one figure was a police man who was not in a tableau and i remember he had fingernail scratches on his face as if people had tried to check if he was real.

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