The Barber Shop at Acland Street

The Barber Shop

Acland Street in St Kilda is not one of those nondescript streets that generous planning and scanty population have rendered dull and commonplace. It is just wide enough to allow for a tram to run thru it in the middle of two lanes of other traffic, while you can safely dart across the street anywhere without worrying for the pedestrian crossing signals to turn green. It is cosy without being congested.

In the mornings you see a few shops serving coffee and breakfast to the office goers from the residential areas nearby gathering around the tram stops and the clinics & pharmacies on both sides of the street alive with steady stream of footfalls.

As twilight descends into gathering dusk and the cries of birds nestling in its many Palm trees become incessant, it takes a different hue as if touched by the rainbow a little distance away in the Port Phillip bay. The bistros and pubs along the street come to life with jostling crowds and live music, all of them brimming into the canopied extensions along the pavements.

Some of these establishments date back to the days when they were called 'taverns' and caused many a farmers' wives of yore to fret about their inveterate husbands hanging around them on market days. The few nooks and indentations in the street serve as bulletin boards for the off-beat from the fringes of the society. There you find all kinds of cheap posters, from those proclaiming the impending marxist revolution across the world to those promising nirvana through Yoga, vedic chanting and kirtans for a few dollars.

The street also offers refuge to the drop-outs of the Australian society clearly identifiable by their matted hair and unwashed looks , peddling necklaces of beads and other odds and ends.
But this post is not about Acland's street and its beer guzzling environs. The street also has shops offering modern beauty treatment for hair, nails , skin and another other organs of human vanity. They offer Botox, waxing, shellac nails, piercing, colouring , blow drying hair, and other forms of Bio-sculpting for a hefty price.

This post is about a quaint little shop that goes by the name 'The Barber Shop' , around the corner block where Acland street meets Barkley Street. This shop offers just the plain old fashioned 'hair cutting and shaving' without any bells and whistles. The decor is pre-1950. It is run by a third generation Barbera ( or Barberina , if you want more euphony) along with her two employees.

The shop exudes old world charm with a display of shaving and hair cutting artefacts from the times that have long gone by. The leather and chromium chairs , the long strops of leather for honing the knives , old razors, American news clippings about new designs in hair clippers and their usage, old Bakelite bodied Radio, shaving mugs of cheap porcelain, carefully preserved old razor blade boxes of thin cardboard give it a nostalgic air. Hair cut is a pricey 23 Australian dollars but I assure you the ambience is worth it.

Leather strops for honing razors

Old Brushes and Razors on display

The barber who attended to me was a young Irish lad who had recently migrated to Australia. Barbers generally do not talk when on the job. May be it hinders their concentration , may be they have seen and experienced in close quarters the vile ego in all of us , they prefer stoic silence when their neck follow their eyes and sway side to side.

This Irish lad was different. He said that there is not much money in this honest-to-the-core hair-cutting, while those who catered to the follies of human nature could rake it with both hands. Probably before soon, 'The Barber Shop' will shed its old world charm and honesty of purpose and embrace a fancier avatar as a 'Spa' or 'Parlour'.