Australia’s first big American-style drive-in shopping centre was not in Sydney. Chermside Drive-In Shopping Centre in Brisbane opened on 30 May 1957. Top Ryde followed in November 1957 — Premier J.J. Cahill opened it — and it is usually called the first regional centre of that type in NSW. Car park, department store, supermarket and specialty shops, all on one planned site: the suburbs were inventing a new main street.
Sydney then scaled up fast. Miranda Fair (1964) was the largest fully enclosed centre in NSW, and Roselands (official opening 12 October 1965, Premier Askin) was billed as the largest in the Southern Hemisphere — Grace Bros at Roselands on a former golf-course site between Hurstville and Bankstown. Downtown still had the older arcades: the Strand (1892), and the Queen Victoria Building (opened 21 July 1898, named for the Diamond Jubilee).
From Arcades to Megamalls – How Australia Learned to Shop Under One Roof
If you grew up in Sydney you've probably got a mall memory or two. Maybe it was the raindrop fountain at Roselands, the revolving star on top of the old Miranda Fair tower, or just a Saturday morning trailing your mum round Grace Bros. The shopping centre is so much a part of suburban life now that it's easy to forget it's only about seventy years old. Before that, people shopped on the main street, at the markets, and in the city arcades. This is the story of how we got from one to the other.
Before the Malls – Sydney's Victorian Arcades
In the 1880s and 1890s Sydney had a problem. The main streets ran south from Circular Quay with hardly any cross streets joining them, and there were no shop awnings yet to keep off the sun and the rain. The answer was the arcade: a covered walkway cut right through a city block, lined with little shops. Thomas Rowe designed the first two, the Sydney Arcade and the Royal Arcade, in 1881 and 1882. His former assistant C. A. Harding built the Victoria Arcade in 1887–1888, and Rowe's Imperial Arcade followed.
The Strand Arcade – 1892
The last and best of them was the Strand. It was designed by the English architect John B. Spencer with Charles E. Fairfax and built by Bignell and Clark between 1890 and 1892. It runs about 104 metres between George Street and Pitt Street and is three storeys high. It opened on 1 April 1892, and more than 600 people were invited to the do. At first it was called the City Arcade, sometimes Arcade Street, but in 1891 it was named after the Strand in London, the smartest shopping and theatre street in that city.
The Sydney papers loved it. The arcade was called "the finest public thoroughfare in the Australian colonies", and the tiled floor became a fashionable place to promenade. It has had a rough life since. It got run down over the years, and on the morning of 25 May 1976 a fire tore through it and badly damaged the George Street end. Prudential Assurance restored it in 1976–1978, copying the golden cast-iron balustrades and the hand-carved cedar posts and repairing the two old hydraulic lifts. There was another fire in 1980. It is the only one of Sydney's Victorian arcades that survives in anything like its first form, and it went on the State Heritage Register on 13 December 2011. Bit of trivia: part of David Bowie's 1983 "Let's Dance" video was shot there.
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The others weren't so lucky. The Imperial Arcade, Thomas Rowe's building between Pitt and Castlereagh Streets, opened in 1891. The first Woolworths store opened in its basement on 5 December 1924. It was closed and demolished in 1961, and a new Imperial Arcade by Stocks and Holdings (now Stockland) opened on the site on 18 October 1965. That one was knocked down in its turn when Westfield Sydney was built from 2009.
Melbourne had its arcades as well, and the Royal Arcade off Bourke Street is still going.
The Queen Victoria Building – 1898
Up the road on George Street was something much bigger. The block had been home to markets since the early colony, and to the Central Police Court. Those uses stopped in 1891 and the City Council took over the land. The Scottish-born architect George McRae, who had come to Sydney in 1884, drew up four designs in different styles. The council picked the Romanesque one, and the Phippard Brothers built it between 1893 and 1898 using trachyte from Bowral and sandstone from Waverley. It's 30 metres wide and 190 metres long.
In 1897 the council decided to name it the Queen Victoria Market Buildings for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and it opened on 21 July 1898. Tailors, mercers, hairdressers, florists and coffee shops moved in, along with Quong Tart's Elite Hall tea rooms. But it was a money-loser. In 1898 only 47 of about 200 spaces were let. By 1912 it was being called an "incubus", and in 1915–16 a "municipal white elephant". The markets moved out to Haymarket in 1910. Later the City Library and the Sydney County Council moved in, and the SCC areas were remodelled in Art Deco style in 1934–1938.
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By 1959 the Lord Mayor, Jensen, wanted it pulled down for a public square with a car park underneath, and as late as 1969 a mayoral candidate was still calling it a firetrap. In the end the Malaysian company Ipoh restored it between 1984 and 1986 on a 99-year lease from the council. The restoration cost $86 million, and the building reopened on 18 November 1986. The heritage people point out that so little of the original inside was left that most of the detail was reconstructed rather than restored. GIC took the building over from Ipoh in 2003.
The city's other great shopping street got its own makeover. Pitt Street between Market and King Streets was closed to cars in the 1990s and became Pitt Street Mall, and its shop rents are now the highest in the country.
The Drive-In Shopping Centre Arrives – 1957
After the war, Australians moved out to the new suburbs and bought cars, and the retailers followed them. The American idea of a big car park surrounded by a department store, a supermarket and a ring of smaller shops came over in the 1950s.
Chermside, Brisbane – 30 May 1957
Brisbane got in first. Building on the Chermside Drive-In Shopping Centre started in October 1955 on a flood-prone block known as Early's Paddock, and six-foot drainage pipes had to be laid to carry Somerset Creek under the car park. The Queensland Premier, Vince Gair, opened it on 30 May 1957. It cost £600,000, sat on 28 acres and was built by the Allan & Stark department store, who promised shopping that would be "both fun and a thrill". It's often described as the first post-war major shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere. Myer bought Allan & Stark in 1959, a big fire in December 1972 destroyed the Woolworths, and the place is now Westfield Chermside.
Top Ryde – 14 November 1957
Sydney's turn came less than six months later. Top Ryde was the dream of Peter Benjamin of the A.J. Benjamin's store family at Chatswood. In 1953 he went to the United States, looked at about twenty of the new shopping centres there, and worked out a design with his friend Peter Yeoman, who was studying American shopping centres in Detroit. Yeoman came up with the apricot brick and the windowless walls. The NSW Premier, Joe Cahill, opened it on 14 November 1957 on a 3.5 hectare site. It was the first major post-war open-air shopping centre in New South Wales, and the second in Australia after Chermside.
Lendlease bought it in 1962, Woolworths came in 1963, and Grace Bros took over the Benjamin's store in 1964. But by the 2000s it was looking tired next to the bigger centres. It was demolished from July 2007, and the new $1.2 billion Top Ryde City opened in stages from November 2009.
Frank Lowy, John Saunders and Westfield – Blacktown, 1959
Frank Lowy was born in Czechoslovakia in 1930 and lived through the war in a ghetto in Hungary. His father, Hugo, was killed at Auschwitz. Frank made his way to Palestine, fought in the 1948 war, and came out to Australia in 1952 to join his family, who were running a small goods delivery business. In the 1950s he ran a delicatessen in Main Street, Blacktown. In 1953 he met another migrant, John Saunders, and the two went into business together.
Their first shopping centre was Westfield Place at Blacktown, which opened in July 1959. The name was a simple one: "west" for western Sydney and "field" because it was built on subdivided farmland. The company was floated on the stock exchange in 1960, built five more centres in New South Wales, and then went into Victoria and Queensland in 1966–67. In 1969 it bought Miranda Fair from Myer for $10 million, and in 1977 it went to America with Trumbull Shopping Park in Connecticut. In 2014 the business was split in two. Scentre Group kept the Westfield centres in Australia and New Zealand, and Westfield Corporation took the overseas ones, which the French company Unibail-Rodamco bought in 2018. Lowy stepped down as Scentre chairman in October 2015 after 55 years at the helm.
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Blacktown's old Main Street shops copped it again in April 1973, when the McNamara company opened Westpoint Blacktown. It was built just west of the old shopping strip, which declined in the face of the competition.
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The 1960s – Going Big and Going Indoors
Melbourne's Chadstone opened on 3 October 1960. Myer built it and Premier Henry Bolte opened it, and it was the biggest shopping centre in Australia at the time. On Sydney's northern beaches, Warringah Mall at Brookvale opened on 4 April 1963. Hammerson built it for £6 million on land that had been part of Brookvale Farm, and it was then the second-biggest centre in the country after Chadstone. Both were open-air.
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Miranda Fair – 16 March 1964
The next big step was putting a roof over the whole thing. Miranda Fair was opened on 16 March 1964 by Premier Bob Heffron in front of 1,600 guests, with a helicopter dropping in the newspapers and fireworks that night. Myer and Farmers built it for £3.25 million on the old Fowler's brick pit. It was the largest fully enclosed shopping centre in New South Wales, until Roselands opened the next year. Westfield bought it in 1969, and in 1972 it added a five-storey office tower with a big, slowly revolving eight-pointed star on the roof. That star was a local landmark, and plenty of people in the Shire were angry when it was knocked off in July 2013 as the tower was demolished for the $475 million rebuild.
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Roselands – 1965
Then came Roselands, the one everyone of a certain age remembers. Grace Bros started building on 9 June 1964 on the old Roselands Golf Course. The site had once held John Fenwick's Belmore House and its rose garden, which gave the centre its name, and the suburb later took the name too. Whitehead & Payne designed it at a cost of $15 million. It had a four-level Grace Bros, a Coles Variety store, a Coles New World supermarket, the Roselands "Theatre Beautiful" cinema, 87 specialty shops, the famous raindrop fountain and the Four Corners food court. Premier Robert Askin opened it in October 1965. At the time it was billed as the largest shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere, but it held that title for less than a year. Bankstown Square opened on 21 September 1966 and was then the biggest in Australia.
A big fire broke out on the top floor of the Grace Bros store at 4.30pm on 13 June 1969 and did millions of dollars' worth of damage. The cinema closed in 1985, and the centre has been reworked several times since, most recently in a $90 million redevelopment that opened in September 2019.
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The Giants of Today
Chadstone – Australia's Biggest
The land at Chadstone was once paddocks of the Convent of the Good Shepherd, with cattle grazing on it until the mid-1950s. Ken Myer looked to America for ideas, and the American firm Welton Becket and Associates was brought in as design architect. The Myer board grumbled that the Americans didn't understand the "Australian concept". Myer sold the centre to the Gandel Group in 1983 for $37 million. The open-air mall was roofed over in 1984 because, as anyone from Melbourne could have told them, the weather down there doesn't suit an open-air mall. After round after round of expansion, including the $660 million "New Chadstone" in 2016, it calls itself the largest shopping centre in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere. Melbourne's Westfield Fountain Gate at Narre Warren, opened in 1980, is listed as second-biggest.
Westfield Parramatta
Parramatta has been a shopping town since the colony began. Grace Bros opened its first Sydney suburban department store on the corner of Church and Argyle Streets in 1933. Westfield Parramatta opened in three stages in 1975, and stage two in September made it the largest shopping centre in Australia at the time. The 1996 expansion made it the biggest again, with about 127,000 square metres of retail space, and a new cinema and lifestyle block opened in 2006.
Westfield Bondi Junction
Bondi Junction's shopping started with a Grace Bros opened in 1934 on the site of the old Hoyts Coronet theatre on Oxford Street. It was rebuilt in 1957 with parking for 120 cars. Then came The Carousel centre in the early 1970s, with a carousel in its atrium, and Bondi Junction Plaza in 1976, built by AMP and the Uniting Church with the coming of the Eastern Suburbs Railway in mind. Westfield pulled the lot together into one huge centre on both sides of Oxford Street, opening in stages from November 2003 to August 2004. Sadly, it's also the place where six people were killed in a stabbing attack on 13 April 2024.
Castle Towers and Macquarie Centre
Up in the Hills district, Castle Towers opened in 1982 with Kmart, Coles and Norman Ross. It kept growing, adding David Jones in 1991 and Grace Bros in 2001, and it now has about 112,000 square metres of lettable space. Since December 2019 it has had an underground tunnel to the new Castle Hill Metro station. Macquarie Centre at North Ryde started with Grace Bros buying 16 acres in 1968. Building was dogged by industrial disputes, the opening was delayed three times, and Premier Neville Wran finally opened it on 17 November 1981. It had an Olympic-sized ice rink and 130 specialty shops.
How the Malls Have Changed – and Where Some of Them Went
The shopping centre has never stood still. The old open-air drive-ins got roofs. Department stores that once anchored a centre have shut. Myer left Top Ryde City in 2015 and Westpoint Blacktown in April 2022, and David Jones walked out of Bankstown in 2007 when its 40-year lease ran out. Franklins shut its very last store at Miranda in April 2015. Harris Scarfe collapsed in 2019–2020, and Toys "R" Us went in 2018. The gaps have been filled with Kmart, Zara, Uniqlo, gyms, Timezone arcades and bowling alleys. Centres now sell themselves on food, entertainment and somewhere to go, not just shops.
Plenty of the originals have been flattened. The first Top Ryde was demolished in 2007–2008. The Imperial Arcade went twice, in 1961 and again for Westfield Sydney. The Miranda tower and its star came down in 2013, and the original Myer at Chadstone was demolished in 1997. Across the Pacific, the Americans have a name for malls that empty out and die: "dead malls". Their trouble there is blamed on too many malls, big-box stores and online shopping. Australia hasn't had that wave of dead malls so far, but online shopping is now the challenge every centre talks about.
Still, when you walk through the Strand under that old glass roof, you're walking the same idea the 1890s Sydneysiders had: get people off the street, out of the weather, and somewhere they'll want to stay a while.
Timeline
- 1881–1882 – Thomas Rowe's Sydney Arcade and Royal Arcade are built.
- 1891 – The Imperial Arcade opens between Pitt and Castlereagh Streets.
- 1 April 1892 – The Strand Arcade opens.
- 1893–1898 – The Queen Victoria Market Buildings are built. They open on 21 July 1898.
- 5 December 1924 – The first Woolworths store opens in the Imperial Arcade basement.
- 1933 – Grace Bros opens at Parramatta, its first Sydney suburban store.
- 1953 – Frank Lowy meets John Saunders. Peter Benjamin tours American shopping centres.
- 30 May 1957 – Chermside Drive-In Shopping Centre opens in Brisbane.
- 14 November 1957 – Top Ryde Shopping Centre is opened by Premier Joe Cahill.
- July 1959 – Westfield Place opens at Blacktown.
- 1960 – Westfield floats on the stock exchange. Chadstone opens on 3 October.
- 1961 – The Imperial Arcade is demolished.
- 4 April 1963 – Warringah Mall opens.
- 16 March 1964 – Miranda Fair opens, the largest enclosed centre in NSW.
- October 1965 – Roselands opens.
- 21 September 1966 – Bankstown Square opens.
- 13 June 1969 – Fire in the Grace Bros store at Roselands. Westfield buys Miranda Fair.
- 1973 – Westpoint Blacktown and Westfield Mount Druitt open.
- 1975 – Westfield Parramatta opens in three stages.
- 25 May 1976 – Fire at the Strand Arcade. Bondi Junction Plaza opens the same year.
- 1977 – Westfield enters the United States.
- 17 November 1981 – Macquarie Centre opens.
- 1982 – Castle Towers opens.
- 1984 – Chadstone is roofed over.
- 18 November 1986 – The restored Queen Victoria Building reopens.
- 2003–2004 – Westfield Bondi Junction is rebuilt and renamed.
- 2007–2008 – The original Top Ryde is demolished.
- 2010–2011 – Westfield Sydney opens on Pitt Street Mall.
- 13 December 2011 – The Strand Arcade goes on the State Heritage Register.
- 2013 – The Miranda office tower and its star are demolished.
- 2014 – Westfield splits into Scentre Group and Westfield Corporation.
- 2016 – "The New Chadstone" expansion opens.
Where the Sources Disagree
- Which was the first? The Westfield Chermside history calls Chermside (May 1957) the first post-war major shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere. The Top Ryde history calls Top Ryde (November 1957) the second in Australia and the first in NSW. The Chadstone history says Chadstone (1960) "marked the transformation of shopping in Australia" to the mall-type centre and calls it Melbourne's first self-contained regional centre. Who counts as first depends on how you define a shopping centre.
- Roselands' opening date. The Roselands Shopping Centre history gives the official opening as 12 October 1965. The Roselands suburb history just says October 1965.
- First enclosed centre. The Roselands suburb history puts Roselands third among fully enclosed centres, after Monaro Mall in Canberra (March 1963) and Miranda Fair (March 1964). The Miranda history calls Miranda Fair the largest enclosed centre in NSW rather than the first.
- Australia's first food court. The Roselands suburb history gives Roselands (1965, Four Corners) the first food court in Australia. The Chadstone history says the Galleria Mall of 1990 held "Australia's first food court". The Bondi Junction history says The Carousel had a food court in the early 1970s, which it calls notable for the time.
- Biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. Roselands was billed as the largest in the Southern Hemisphere in 1965. Bankstown Square was called Australia's largest in 1966, and Westfield Parramatta was called the largest in 1975 and again after 1996. Chadstone now claims the title. Each claim was made at a different time and on a different measure.
- When the Strand got its name. The heritage listing says the arcade opened in 1892 but was named in 1891, and the 125th anniversary was celebrated in August 2016, which counts from 1891.
My Earlier Posts
- Queen Victoria Building – George Street, York Street, Market Street
- The Sydney Arcade – 400 George Street – King Street
- David Jones – First Store – George Street cnr Barrack Street
- Buckingham's Department Store – Oxford Street, Darlinghurst
- Rowe Street – Laneways – Sydney
- Quong Tart – The Scottish Mandarin of Sydney – Braidwood, the Tea Rooms and the QVB
- Samuel Terry – The Botany Bay Millionaire's House – In Front of the Angel Arcade
- Demolished Sydney
Sources
- Wikipedia, "The Strand Arcade", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strand_Arcade (accessed 17 October 2026). The Strand and QVB articles draw on the NSW State Heritage Register entries, CC BY 4.0.
- Wikipedia, "Queen Victoria Building", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria_Building (accessed 17 October 2026). The Strand and QVB articles draw on the NSW State Heritage Register entries, CC BY 4.0.
- Wikipedia, "Imperial Arcade", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Arcade (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Royal Arcade, Melbourne", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Arcade,_Melbourne (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Pitt Street Mall", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitt_Street_Mall (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Sydney", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Sydney (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Chermside", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Chermside (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Top Ryde City", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Ryde_City (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Frank Lowy", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lowy (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Scentre Group", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scentre_Group (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Group", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Group (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Blacktown", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacktown (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westpoint Blacktown", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westpoint_Blacktown (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Chadstone Shopping Centre", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chadstone_Shopping_Centre (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Warringah Mall", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Warringah_Mall (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Miranda", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Miranda (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Roselands Shopping Centre", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roselands_Shopping_Centre (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Roselands, New South Wales", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roselands,_New_South_Wales (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Bankstown Central", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankstown_Central (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Fountain Gate", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Fountain_Gate (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Parramatta", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Parramatta (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Bondi Junction", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Bondi_Junction (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "2024 Bondi Junction stabbings", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Bondi_Junction_stabbings (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Castle Towers", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Towers (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Macquarie Centre", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Centre (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Westfield Mount Druitt", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westfield_Mount_Druitt (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Wikipedia, "Dead mall", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_mall (accessed 17 October 2026).
- Images: Wikimedia Commons, with each photographer and licence credited under the picture.