“You don’t look good today, what’s wrong?â€, Irene Pappas will ask. Or, “Who cut your hair? I don’t like itâ€. Those who know Irene would never dream of being offended.They know it’s “just Ireneâ€.
Always ready with advice or a comment (whether or not you want one) Irene has been an institution in West Hobart since 1972, when she first came to work in the “tiny, tiny shop†run by her brother-in-law, the fourth owner of the business on the site where Hill Street Grocer stands today.
That was only a couple of years after Irene arrived in Tasmania from Athens with her parents and sister as an 18-year-old. “It was June 6, I remember the date,†she said. “There it was summer, here it was cold and I never got out of bed for five or six days, and I cried.â€
“My first (and only) boss was Emanuel Kalis, one of my cousins, I had lots of uncles and cousins in Hobart.â€
Then followed her own businesses, a take-away fish ’n’ chip shop at Bridgewater and a supermarket in New Norfolk. “I never went to English classes, I learned by starting to talk with the customers,†Irene said.
Twenty years ago, she and her former husband took over the Hill Street shop. “Then this was an area of old people, now it is young families, but some of our first customers still come here, people in their 90s,†she said.
Irene then could have bought a house in the neighbourhood for $6,000 or $7,000, but didn’t because “we had the flat at the back of the shopâ€.
In 30 years at Hill Street, Irene reckons she had only about five years off – including the time off when her daughters Dianna, Olga, Maria and Connie were born.
In 1992 Dianna became engaged to Marco Nikitaras, who had also grown up in a shop but was then a bricklayer. Irene invited him to come in out of the cold and the uncertainty of bricklaying into the warmth of a family business and the certainty of a solid seven days work a week if that was what he wanted.
The shop had been growing steadily since Irene took over, but when the business went to Marco and Dianna it “grew, grew, grewâ€.
After eight years Marco and Dianna vacated the flat at the back of the shop to allow for the most recent expansion in mid 2001, when Marco’s brother Nick and his wife Natalia joined Marco and Dianna is the business.
But Irene “never went anywhere, I am always working with Marcoâ€. Her six or seven-day week has cut back to five, but when Irene works she is there for the whole day – that’s 14 hours or so.
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