“I came to this area in the late 80s to go to school to study arts and it was really Ann who got it all going. It was a council scheme to revitalize port Kembla and she had a grant in 1991 and she approached us, because we had a band, and asked “do you want to run a performance café for a week?”. And that’s how it all started. It was called The Star Cafe. It’s all closed up now but it used to be a Macedonian milk bar. It was run by a guy called Lubja and you’d go in there and it was like something out of the 50s, old guys playing chess, drinking whiskey, that sort of thing. It was a place where Macedonian men hung out. You’d get these shish kebabs, and it had sort of two rooms – it had a milk bar room and then it had another room on the other side so it was like a u-shape.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

Photo: Nina Kourea