Gerard Windsor

OPEN HOUSE AT THE PALACE

An Australian Street

Gerard Windsor

168 pages • 24 illustrations • limited edition of 200 copies • individually signed and numbered •Index

ISBN: 978-1-876718-38-1

Hardback $80 (plus postage)
Ebook (PDF) $40

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OVERVIEW

Open House at the Palace: An Australian Street is about the life of that street, its personality and its personalities. Hence it is chock full of stories and portraits — the ex-cop who was a receiver of stolen goods, the S&M brothel, the loved and not- so-loved shopkeepers, the Indigenous pensioner and the Indigenous corporatehigh-flyer, the strong gay community, the rooming houses (‘suit single gentlemen’), the footpath dwelling residents of the nursing home, the wits and guardian angels of the street.

This is a unique item of Australian history — a portrait of just one street teeming with individual human lives — and a few animal lives as well.

Gerard Windsor has published 11 books, most of them non-fiction, about communities — his family, a religious order, an infantry company in Vietnam. Now he has turned to the community of the street he has lived in for 43 years, Palace Street Petersham in Sydney’s inner west.

 

Palace Pharmacy at 65 Palace Street
Dorothy Moubarak operated the Palace Pharmacy from
1972 to 1983. The front of the general store operated
by George and Maria Cassimatis is visible to the right
(Dorothy Moubarak).

Harry & Maria Petratos

Palace Street was turned into a fi lm set in 1994 when scenes for Billy’s Holiday were shot (Mark Sabolch).

Image of Tony Edwards of the Salvation Army Band playing outside Armon Nursing Home, on the corner of Palace and Croydon Streets c 1982. Drawn as an illustration to Gerard Windsor’s story 'The Sad Music of Men’.