Marble Bar Cafe, Grafton.

Hugh Gilchrist
on 05.02.2005

The first Notaras to reach Sydney was Lambrinos, who landed with some 40 other Kythirans in 1902, having left his wife with six young children at Frylingianika to work the family farm. For seven years he worked for an Austrian restaurant-keeper in George Street near Circular Quay, cleaning fish at the markets and sending money to his family. In 1905 he brought out his eldest son, Ioannis, and in 1908 his second son, Antonios. In Kythira a repatriate had told Antonios that in Australia the children rode horses to school, but at Fort Street School, which Antonios attended for a year, he saw not a single horse. There, having no English, he learned little and endured cultural prejudice, including the taunt of “Dago”. His father, who had almost no English and could not read or write, could give him little help. In 1909 Lambrinos Notaras decided that only by acquiring his own shop and employing his sons in it could he support his family. He found an old fruit shop in Grafton, and with his sons’ help turned it into a thriving business, the Marble Bar Cafe. Illiteracy and poor English handicapped him, but each morning, still learning the language, Antonios would translate newspaper items for him with the aid of a dictionary. Two years later he opened another cafe in Grafton and put 16-year-old Antonios in charge of it. They prospered and in 1913 Lambrinos, after a 13-year absence, returned to his wife and other children in Frylingianika, leaving John, now 22, and Antonios, now 20, to manage the shops. The outbreak of war in 1914 prevented his return to Australia but the two young men battled on, and later, joined by their brother Theodore, they became major property owners in Grafton.

Stella Aird (nee, Kelly)
on 15.09.2005

The ABC cafe in Gilgandra, in NSW, owned for decades by my parents, Paul and Chris Kelly, had almost identical decor and fit out to the Marble Bar in Grafton. ABC cafe, Gilgandra, NSW, 1940's