George and Basil Toparis ventured into trucks and frozen food business Toparis Brothers Frozen Foods which they later sold to their brother Nick Toparis, accountant Bob McCallum and a relative, Theo Mylonas. Photo: Toparis family collection.
In the late 1970s two young Goulburn businessmen, George and Basil Toparis, grew restless.
Their family’s three businesses, the Green Valley fruit shop in Auburn Street, a wholesale fruit and veg and frozen foods businesses inside a shed out the back were rapidly outgrowing the site.
So Basil and George bought a much bigger site near an industrial estate in Robinson Street and against their accountant Bob McCallum’s advice, sold the most profitable of all their enterprises, the frozen foods business.
Basil was more passionate about trucks and fruit and veg, not having to put on a heavy coat to work inside the cool room. Over his 26-year partnership with George, their reputation for hard work and reliability spread like wildfire.
In the pre-supermarket era they supplied all of Goulburn’s 72 corner stores with fruit and vegetables and the 24 fruit and veg shops in the main street. Food retailing boomed in a growing city. Basil remembers 18 delicatessens in Auburn Street alone.
Working all day and driving through the night, the brothers expanded into Canberra supplying Parliament House, Canberra Hospital and other shops. Basil only stopped by the road for naps, before resuming driving.
In those days Coles and Woolworths variety stores did not sell fresh produce. He changed that through his friendship with the manager of Woolworths in Goulburn.
When the manager came crying one day saying he had nowhere to stay after his wife had left him, Basil consoled him, saying: “I have a four-bedroom home in Clifford Street, you are welcome to come and stay. I’m never home; I’m away on trips.
“He stayed for a couple of years; he used to mop the floors, fill the fridge. I never charged him any rent,” Basil said.
One day Basil suggested to him that Woolworths should stock fruit in their Goulburn store.
“I took four lines – apples, oranges, bananas, whatever was in season,” Basil said. “Later in the morning he rang to say they had sold out and wanted more. He couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it either.”
Soon the Toparises were supplying two newly-opened Woolworths shops in Canberra. Gradually Woolworths acquired 23 ACT ShopRite outlets, which the enterprising Goulburn brothers stocked as well.
Later, another sideline interest led to the eventual shift from their thriving wholesale business. They developed the Corinthian Mall in Auburn Street (now occupied by Aldi supermarket) and the El Dorado Arcade in Clifford Street, which businessman John Divall bought.
Basil Toparis (left) with brothers Elley, Paul, George and Nick and sister Tessie. Christened Anastasios, Basil was renamed by schoolmates at Bourke Street Primary School because they could not pronounce his first name. Photo: Toparis family collection.
Basil began buying, improving and selling properties, revelling in the wheeling and dealing, while George bought the Bradfordville Shopping Centre.
One of Basil’s later deals secured Supertex Industries, at the time an eyesore in Chantry Street. He cleaned up the site, refenced the land and later subdivided it into three sections and sold them.
By this time Basil and George had sold their fruit and veg partnership. George relocated to Queensland. Basil decided after an unsuccessful attempt to retire to become a developer.
“I knew nothing about building; I got on to (builders) Robert Rampton and Lionel Judd who had returned from Queensland and were looking for a job. I thought beauty, this is ideal.”
Their first major venture was developing 80 villas in Newton Street opposite Wollondilly Public School on land he and George owned.
At their first open house one Saturday morning their solicitor Dick Peterswald working from a caravan on site was kept busy when 11 villas sold, mostly to widowed women.
The partnership with Robert Rampton was mutually beneficial. Basil’s sons Richard and Phillip were apprenticed to him. “He learned a lot off me wheeling and dealing and I learned a lot from him building,” Basil said.
They continued together building hundreds of homes before embarking on their most ambitious development in the early 1990s, a new suburb which became Crestwood. But sales were dangerously slow. “We had 30 homes and no buyers,” Basil said.
“So we rented them and after 12 months we refunded the rent, giving them a deposit to buy,” he said. “It was a rent-to-buy scheme, ” Basil’s wife Dora said.
Selling three-bedroom home-and-land packages on 1000 sqm blocks for under $100,000 was difficult as interest rates rocketed to 17 per cent.
Builders Robert Rampton and Lionel Judd with Basil Toparis. They created a display at a trade fair to promote new villas in Newton Street, Goulburn, which proved ideal for people downsizing. Photo: Toparis family collection.
But once Richard and Phillip became licensed builders, the family confidently stood on their own as Ganter Constructions and set their sights on an even bigger development.
On farmland north of the Wollondilly River a vast new residential development would test the family-run enterprise to the maximum, as next week’s concluding story will recount.
