Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Stock Road Market - a peoples' paradise

The price of potatoes has jumped by about a third at the Stock Road Market where we buy our vegetables. This is apparently part of Prime Minister Rudd's inflation plans to bring the country to it's knees. I gather he has some sort of scheme brewing to open the floodgates to foreign guest workers. The idea is that they will be happy to work for less pay than everyone else and thus keep prices down.

There are two vegetable outlets at the Stock Road Market at Bibra Lake. It's located in an uninspiring industrial precinct. Don't bother looking for the lake. It's a couple km away to the east and almost as dry as a chip potato. Nor are the markets real ones with dozens of sellers promoting fresh produce that they've grown on a hopeful hippy hobby farm. That was the original concept over twenty years ago, but the hippies sold their hobby farms and became rich capitalists instead. In my view the entire area today is pretty scungy, and hosts a lot of undercapitalised businesses.

So now there are only two retail vegetable outlets in the market precinct. One of them is called something like Go Nuts in Wot Not. The place opens every day of the week and seem to specialise in stuff picked up as huge remaindered lots from wholesalers. Not only fruit and vegetables, but things like warehoused lollies. For the last few weeks they've had pallet loads of lollies - large cartons for five bucks each. Out of respect for our dentist we didn't buy any. They also carry a lot of gaudy trinkets and knick knacks (wot nots) which I've never actually seen anyone buy. The operators are cheerful and obviously hard working. One of the men regularly spruiks for customers via a loud speaker system, which can clearly be heard from afar.

Sometimes we buy a few vegetables from this store, but we pick and choose. Generally we get most of our stuff from the other outlet which is run by a matriarcal Chinese family beneath a huge permanent circus-like tent fringed with razor wire, in the middle of the car park. This operation doesn't display a business name other than Stock Road Central.

Both these vegetable outlets are much cheaper than the major supermarkets. Unlike the Go Nuts folk, the Chinese vendors only open Friday through to Sunday, and so for the most part their produce seems pretty fresh. They always seem much busier than Go Nuts operation. Usually there's people queued at all the six cash registers on Friday mornings. That gets the Go Nuts man warmed up on his microphone.

Not everyone who works under the tent is Chinese. There's a Vietnamese man who stacks the lettuce and cauliflowers. They sell a lot of lettuce. I had a chat to him once. He'd been a soldier with the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) during the 1960-70s Vietnam War and then escaped to Australia as a 'boat person' refugee. He'd carried with him a few battle scars on his body. Now he spends a lot of his time peacefully trimming lettuces.

When we were there yesterday the owners had put up by the cash registers a few photocopied pictures of victims of the recent earthquake disaster at Sechuan, China. They were running an appeal for donations.

I made a panorama of this shopping precinct a couple of weeks ago. A glimpse of modern Australia you won't find in a tourist brochure, as you'll more appreciate if you click it up.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

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