Marchant Home in Tod Street - new Post Office site
| Address: | Tod Street |
|---|---|
| Town or Locality: | gawler |
According to Glimpses of Gawler Vol1 p80 "Photographer Eb Marchant and his family resided in the house that stood for many years on the site of the new Post Office.. He developed the gardens to such a standard that bus tours would call, as well as providing popular settings for wedding photographs."
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Memories of Marchant Home in Tod Street - new Post Office site
Barbera Gerlach remembers: I was interested to see the photograph of Marchant’s garden in The Bunyip feature Gawler Now and Then. It reminded me of the time I was employed at Marchants photographic developing and printing service which was operating from a building next to their house. This was in the early 1950s and I walked through that beautiful garden every day on my way into work. At the Tod Street entrance there was a gate in the form of a large butterfly, colourfully painted. (The book Glimpses of Gawler volume two has a picture of the gate on page 43.) Beyond the gates were other features including several grottos, a number of flower beds edged in ornamental stone, an aviary, a fishpond with a fountain, and of course the huge flower basket you pictured last week. Eb Marchant, in your feature called Tasman, worked in the garden every day, while his son Trevor, a well-known Gawler identity, ran the photographic business. The beautiful garden was a local attraction and we often saw busloads of tourists stopping at the gate. I was one of about ten working there at the time, with the company very well known, processing mail order films from all over Australia as well as from those dropped into Marchants’ gift shop in the Main Street.
For some reason, I think from a promotional tour, there were a lot of mail orders from Aboriginal customers, from stations up north - lots of pictures of men on horses and outback and sometimes ones the girls weren’t allowed to print!
I recall quite a lot of details from the photography business - the dark room was under the stairs, on a fine day the strips of negatives were hung on the clothesline to dry, at the windows of the top storey where the light was good, were the girls ‘spotting’, there were two small stone cubicles - quite possibly previously outhouses - with the evil-smelling chemicals.
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