Melbourne illustrator Eamon Donnelly in front of a closed milk bar in Brunswick East. Below: images from the book. Credit:Justin McManus The milk bar was also near a busy Catholic church. ''After church the joint was packed,'' says Smith. The milkshake milk came from a nearby dairy. He was an agent for James' and Red Tulip chocolate and would decorate the corner store lavishly at Easter and Christmas. He got a new sandwich system going and increased sales yet more. ''I kept the shop very clean,'' he says. ''Mrs Jones would come down for her milk, every madman and his uncle would come. As soon as I went out the back, someone would come in. Those were the days when a milk bar was worth having.'' The family lived upstairs. Three kids. That's the reason he got out after four years: the family, not the business. ''No life for a family,'' he says. The shop was open every day for 12 hours minimum. But, he says ''you got to know people. You were a part of the community.'' Smith's daughter, Lindy Bok, lives in Bentleigh. Recently an IGA mini-supermarket opened up near the Patterson Road strip's sole milk bar. She and her two children can walk to both from their house around the corner but she says no to the IGA for the kids' slurpees and is happy to pay more at the milk bar where the Chinese couple are friendly and attentive and nice to the kids despite the language barrier and the pressures on them to survive. The milk bar already had a slurpee machine before the IGA arrived; then the IGA came and a little later put in a slurpee machine. ''It was a social decision to buy them from the milk bar,'' she says.

WHAT is a milk bar or an ex-milk bar if not a repository for memories and associations and lives already lived? Melbourne illustrator Eamon Donnelly spent much of his childhood near a milk bar in East Geelong and his mother worked there for a while, too, helping out when owners Dave and Peg had their fourth child. Everyone called it ''Dave's'', he says, even though it didn't have a sign saying so. It wasn't even called ''Dave's Milk Bar'', just ''Dave's''. Donnelly has self-published a wonderful book on Melbourne milk bars - Milkbar, a photographic archive, Vol 1. He's interested in the empty ones as much as the working ones; around his patch of Brunswick, Coburg and Reservoir, empty, abandoned milk bars dot the streetscape like relics of a former world. In Coburg's Reynard Street alone there are three, all empty. At the other end of Canning Street from Ichuyen Nguyen's place in Carlton, there's a historic milk bar in a building that dates to 1860 that shut just before Christmas in 2009. It's been lived in by squatters and a squatter has written on a wall: ''We love those who provide shelter.''

Donnelly likes the faded pastel colours and weathered awnings and the remnants of old signs at the derelict milk bars. He lived in one once in West Brunswick that had been a milk bar since 1940 and he ran his studio out of it. Around where he lives now and among people like him - youngish artists or ''creatives'' - a reconditioned milk bar on a corner block in the inner north is a great space, a great symbol and a great aesthetic. But it is bittersweet. His book is full of images of decay and weathering and uselessness, yet in its pure form a milk bar is useful and alive. ''I would love them to be still open,'' he says. In the book he writes of a constantly changing world with the milk bar as an ''idealised image of the Australia we used to know''. Economics has intervened. Domenic Greco runs a not-for-profit industry group called CAMBA (the Convenience and Mixed Business Association) representing milk bars and independent convenience stores, which is engaged in a pitched battle for hearts and minds with the more aggressive industry group AACS (the Australasian Association of Convenience Stores). It looks after the bigger players - called ''defined convenience'' stores - such as 7-Elevens, service stations and Coles Express. AACS executive director Jeff Rogut pulls no punches. ''Corner stores largely don't exist and have a very bleak future. They have not reinvented their offer. The perception is grubby and dingy with one tin of baked beans, whereas the perception we go for is modern, bright, fresh and safe.''

His stable of ''defined'' convenience stores grew 3 per cent last year, to 5647 across Australia. Meanwhile, the milk bars shrivel and die. Greco says the number of milk bars in Victoria has fallen from about 6000 30 years ago to about 1500 now. The reasons he gives are many. When trading hours were deregulated in the late 1980s, allowing stores other than milk bars to open on Sunday, it ''decimated'' the stores, he says - ''75 per cent of our membership went down in two years''. Rent and utility costs are high, bread and milk are very cheap as the big supermarkets engage in a price war and the big soft drink companies do deals with franchises such as Subway, allowing them to sell cheaply. In some council areas the milk bar owners are asked to pay fees to put newspaper or ice-cream hoardings on the footpath - $50 a month in Ichuyen Nguyen's case, to the Melbourne City Council. ''I don't do it any more,'' he says. Which means a passer-by might not realise the shop sells newspapers and ice-creams. Greco says a range of smaller, recent shifts have had a big effect. Milk bars were selling phone credit cards for pre-paid mobile phones but the rise of smartphones and mobile plans has stalled that trade. Myki public transport cards means milk bars sell far fewer Metcards. The fall in people smoking and the rise in tobacco tax has damaged the cigarette trade.

''No one seems to care,'' he says. ''I have seen it all unfolding in the last five years. Yes, times change. But this is poor competition policy killing off an industry.'' Greco has positioned himself as a white knight for the ''entrepreneurship, community culture and vibrancy'' of the milk bar in Victoria. He's cooking up an industry-wide plan to secure a ''complete supply chain solution'' based on the ability for milk bars to buy goods competitively from suppliers and order individually, according to the demographic of their neighbourhood, through a dedicated web-based warehouse. He fears, however, that it may be too late, given the pricing power of the supermarkets and big convenience stores. ''It's going to be hard to pull back,'' Greco says. His organisation's archives include an industry magazine for milk bar owners going back to 1916, tracing history through two austere wars, the postwar suburbanisation and factory boom, the advent of fast food and rising urban crime. The history of the milk bar holds within it the histories of a city. Meantime, the AACS is marching on to new frontiers. ''The future for us is more food,'' says Rogut. ''Fresh-baked bread, food deliveries, meals to take away. The future is in convenience.'' The lure of the past is strong though. It's interesting that plenty of the milk bars that have become cafes or restaurants have kept ''milk bar'' in the name as a way of trading off the association with simpler, friendlier times. Jerry's Milk Bar in Elwood, the Johnston Street Milk Bar in Abbotsford. They keep the facade - the public face or mask - but renovate the interior.

It is also possible to see the proliferation of Indian grocery stores as a further threat to the milk bar, as Melbourne and its people change and then change some more. The Age's newspaper database shows that we started reporting on milk bars struggling in 1981 with a piece on John Hrambanis' ''family-style'' shop in South Yarra being swamped by supermarkets, shopping malls and a 7-Eleven. Historically the milk bar was the domain of the Greek or Italian postwar migrant, like Hrambanis, fast-tracking their economic success. Now there is a strong Asianisation of Melbourne's milk bars. The 163 provisional visa to Australia allows prospective migrants to come in with family and operate a business with a view to getting a permanent business skills visa after two years, allowing citizenship. This is what young Shanghai couple Jeff Cai and Nina Wang have done in Brunswick. Their corner milk bar has a dead neon sign over the door that would say ''cooked meats'' if it worked - but it doesn't. The shop, however, is spotless and busy. The couple have had it six months; they have been in Melbourne for only eight months. They bought the shop and rent the dwelling behind to live in and open every day. ''It's hard work,'' says Cai, 29. ''But it is convenient for my customers and we get a little experience and it helps us learn English. People around here are very kind.'' In Abbotsford Street, Abbotsford, down near the convent, in a street with two milk bars, Greek-Cypriot Maria Lelleton stills runs her wonderful corner store after 50 years. About half that time she has done it on her own after her husband died. She lives behind the shop and the door between her lounge and her business is always open.

Growing up nearby, photographer Bonnie Savage befriended Lelleton, hung out at her shop as a child and ended up working there. She remembers dishes of Greek-Cypriot home-cooked food being given to special customers, she remembers bread being given to the poor. But she also remembers her friend having both arms broken in a robbery. To her, as a child, from a toddler to a teenager, the lady up the road in the milk bar became a kind of role model and her shop a kind of school. ''She is one of the most inspiring women I have ever met,'' Savage says. In this way, the milk bar played a role in the community far beyond what was ever expected and far beyond even what we have retrospectively ascribed. Further out into the expanding Melbourne suburbs of the era was Ringwood. Milk bar central back in the day. Author and travel writer Julietta Jameson says her 'hood had ''no servo, no 7-Eleven, and it was a 15-minute walk to the big shops in the high street''. Instead, the Great Ryrie Street milk bar, run by a man her sister dubbed ''Flabby Gabby'' because he was very thin, was the epicentre of their young lives. ''It was like a village square. The milk bar, the park and the phone box.'' The store sat in the midst of three warring schools - Ringwood High, Ringwood Tech and Aquinas College. Rites were played out, independence gained. She says the humble milk bar gave her sustenance, reward and entertainment.

I asked Jameson to describe the place in her mind. ''Cool and dark,'' she says - a refuge from the Australian sun. She talks about lino and the lolly counter and the ''ching'' from the bell on the door. The milkshakes. All the things our collective nostalgia knows so well. This one is still open for business: Peter's Milk Bar now, of Ringwood. A going concern. Eamon Donnelly's Milkbar book is available from his online store islandcontinent.bigcartel.com.