Greg Jepsen outside the former family corner store on the corner of Cowper and Clifford streets, Goulburn. The family slept in three bedrooms upstairs including the boys’ bedroom on the open balcony with a large blind (now enclosed, at right). Susie remembers the boys hanging their socks through chicken wire to air at night. One freezing winter’s morning they discovered the socks were frozen stiff. Photo: John Thistleton.
Reeking of freshly baked bread and bundles of unwrapped newspapers, family-run corner stores in Goulburn once served their neighbourhoods as if they were an extended family.
On the corner of Clifford and Cowper streets a solid old inn later became a grocer and general goods shop. Owned by the Knowles family, then the Hilliards, it became Jepsen’s corner store in 1954 when Mick and Agnes Jepsen bought and ran it until 1982.
Mick’s daughter Susie, one of four daughters, remembers her hardworking father as wiry and strong as an ox. “I have seen him carry huge hessian bags of potatoes and pumpkins, also wheat and sugar and crates of eggs,” she said. A returned soldier from New Guinea, Mick had worked at plenty of jobs, including as a drover’s cook along the Murray River.
One of the Jepsens’ three sons, Greg, is still friends with Geoff ‘Red’ Handley who lived next door. Geoff’s parents Jim and Thelma and their parents Roy and Pearl became good friends. They would regularly knock on the door after hours for bread or milk.
“We were taught not to knock people back; we were there to help them,” Greg said.
Before supermarkets and cars arrived people valued their corner stores. Greg well remembers regular customers on either side of the shop: the Handleys, Rices, Ralphs, McLellands, O’Learys, Morgans, Boytons, Todkills, Kennedys, McTiernans and Hoads. Other families included the Howards, Knowles, Johnstones, Coopers, Greers, and to a lesser extent Cunninghams, Flanagans, Mullins, Chestertons, Bryces, Cotterills, Burrows, Wilding and Mrs Soper.
Late in the day three or four times a week Mick would drive his EH Holden station wagon with the back seat down delivering groceries around town and out to the farms and stations including to the Maple-Browns at Springfield on the Braidwood Road.
He did the book work at night. “He was pretty good with numbers; he drummed them into us,” Greg said. “He gave us jobs to do in the shop, particularly around the lolly counter. The young kids would come in and say how much is one of them, two of them?”
Selling freckles, jelly babies, marshmallows, musk sticks, liquorice sticks, Wagon Wheels and Kit Kats, Greg soon got to know his young customers. So often did one of them, Ray Mooney, call in for Marella jubes, the two boys became lifelong mates.
Jepsen sisters Susie, Kate and Margie on the balcony of the former corner store in Goulburn several years ago, reminiscing about the days of the landmark business. Photo: Greg Jepsen.
“As we grew older we could serve generally in the shop,” Greg said. “You put potatoes or your fruit and vegetables on the scales and adjusted it against the prices and worked out how much you would charge the customer. You often had to do a lot of the sums in your head.”
Jepsen’s opened from 9 am to 6:30 pm six days a week. On Sundays they took a break for an hour to attend mass, opened for another hour and closed on Sunday afternoons. “We usually had a beautiful baked dinner with dessert, and the washing up went on for hours,” Susie said.
They bought fruit and veg wholesale from the Toparis brothers near Wright Heatons, bread from Golden Crust bakery and cakes from Mrs Henness’ shop in Auburn Street.
The baker left 30 to 40 loaves of fresh bread in big cartons just inside the shop’s back door every morning. “Nothing like the smell of fresh warm bread,” Greg said.
Mr Chesterton stocked fireworks in the lead up to the Queen’s Birthday long weekend in June and gathered with neighbours at Chestertons in Clifford Street to celebrate. “He would gather all his rubbish in the back yard and light it for the big bonfire and cracker night,” Greg said.
Susie couldn’t wait for cracker night. “I pocketed a bundle of twopenny bungers about 10 cm long on my way to school one day, and at lunchtime with some friends, we let them off in the school woodyard,” she said. “For effect we put empty jam tins over them which flew sky high when the wick burnt down.”
This photograph was taken well before the arrival of the Jepsen family, when the double-storey corner residence was run by other business owners. Photo: Jepsen family collection.
As the children became teenagers their responsibilities increased. “On reaching driving age we often did these deliveries for Dad, with the old leather money bag over our shoulders,” Susie said.
Greg left the shop when he was 18 and joined the public service in Canberra and completed his accountancy studies, having already received a solid grounding in numbers at Jepsen’s corner store.
