A Life in Sausages: Max Thompson of Queen Victoria Market
It’s a Thursday afternoon. I’m at the Queen Victoria Market, hosting a couple of tourists.
We’re at a stall near the bottom of the meat, fish poultry hall, towards Elizabeth Street. I’m struck by a display of sausages. There are 24 flavours of sausages on offer, which is surely a world record.
I ask the butcher whether there has ever been more sausage flavours on display at one time.
The butcher looks me up and down.
“Dunno,” he says. “Maybe not.”
The butcher’s name is Max. Max Thompson. His real name is Alexander, but most people call him Max.
He says he used to make thousands of sausages a week by hand.
Max puts up his hands, facing out towards me. They’re knotted and gnarled, and full of work.
A long time ago Max bought a mincing machine, he says, which makes it easier to make sausages.
Not that it matters. He’s getting out on Christmas Eve – retiring – after 50 years at the market.
Max keeps talking.
Hang on. Fifty years!
Max, however, will not be diverted.
He reaches beneath a stainless steel surface and pulls out a copy of the Skyhook’s 1976 album Straight in a Gay Gay World.
The image on the album’s inside cover features a bunch of butchers on the left; the butchers are decked out in white tunics made of tough cotton, with navy aprons below the waist. The five members of the Skyhooks are on the right. They are done up in eye shadow and fancy dress.
A black sheep stands between the two groups. The sheep looks non-plussed, as well he might.
He never asked to become a visual focus for a changing world.
Max, though?
Max is having a great time.
That’s him on the far left of the image, toting a cleaver, portraying the butcher’s eternal task.
We’ll always need meat. Even when the Skyhooks are wearing make-up.
Max remembers the shoot fondly. He says all sorts of things have happened at the market.
He leans on the stainless steel, balancing his stance on one of his tough hands. I’m nearly 80, he says. It’s time to go.
Time for me to go, too. On with my tour. I have an American couple who want to try a meat pie.
A week later, I’m back at the market just after opening time on a Tuesday morning. To talk to Max about retirement.
Max’s wife Lorna is busy at her butchering. She looks up with a smile as wide as the bench.
Max has worked hard, she says. It’s time for another life.
Max looks at me. He lets the moment sink in.
Then he’s off! There is much to talk about when you’re been at the market for 50 years.
This used to be a great market, Max says.
A great market!
“Now they’re turning it into a shopping centre.”
Max gestures along the empty aisle, past the poultry stalls and up towards the organic meat joints.
Mate, I say, it’s 7 o’clock in the morning.
Max wants none of it.
“They used to be lining up at 5!”
Max’s stall is close to the Elizabeth Street entrance. He hauls me outside and around the corner, towards a panel of historic photos.
He jabs at a photo that features a butcher who stands before a slab of wood that has been adorned with rows of meat.
That’s right. The butcher stands in front of his slab. Right alongside his customers.
In front!
This butcher is wearing the traditional white tunic and blue apron. He looks proud and chirpy in front of the steaks and chops. A set of clock-face scales hangs beside him.
Max jabs at the photo again.
“No window, no nothing.
“We served from the front. Just a slab. Just a scale.
“That was the real market.”
Max grew up in Buckingham Street, Richmond. He wanted to become a builder, but his father said he should become a butcher, and his father made the rules.
Max was 15 years of age when he began at Rowley’s butchery in Bridge Road, Richmond. At 21, he got married. He and his wife raised four children in Bundoora.
Max later began at the Vic market with Ross Amott, who was a wonderful mentor. But Max wanted more. He wanted his own caper.
He got two bank loans and paid $26,000 for a shop in the market. Through nous and work ethic, he built a strong business.
Max says he worked 90 hours a week in those days. He was at the wholesale market at 2am.
He finished the displays in his windows at the market by 5am at the latest, just before the customers began filing in.
Then a shuddering jolt.
Max was 53 years of age when his wife left him after 32 years of marriage. Max was devastated, but he gave her everything. After all, she had raised the kids.
Max had to start again. He knuckled down. He soon got back on his feet.
He invested in property. He helped out fellow butchers who were in trouble. He kept making sausages by the barrow-load.
At this point in the story, Max adds an element of display. He kneels down on the plastic matting, which is not a bad effort for a 79-year-old. He starts up with a scooping action, making out as if he’s mixing sausage mince.
“This is how I did it,” he says.
Forty years ago, Max was making 2000 kilograms of sausages a week.
He drags out a large plastic tub, which, according to its packaging, has a capacity of 45 kilograms. Effectively, he made enough sausages to fill 50 of those tubs of sausages every week. All by hand.
Max says it was a godsend when he bought a mincing machine. He could direct the mince into the casing, which he then bound up to create the sausages.
Max’s restlessness led him to create his range of sausages. His best-sellers are Spanish chorizo, lamb and rosemary, beef burgundy, and herb and garlic.
That’s all fine. Sausages are sausages. But who buys the gizzards?
Max’s stall is the most exotic in the market, with beef tongue, ox heart and various creations from the innards of a goat.
And lamb pluck, you ask?
Lamb pluck is a combination of heart, lung and liver, which Scottish people use as the basis for haggis. The Scots, bless them, insert the haggis into a lamb paunch, which is otherwise known as a stomach.
“People love it,” Max says.
Really?
“Some people.”
Max uses his upright saw to give me a display of cutting up a lamb. The saw is suspended between a fixed point above eye level and the bench. The process of cutting up a carcass is known as “breaking”.
Within a minute, Max has broken the lamb into barbecue chops, loin chops, and back straps. Also rack of lamb and leg of lamb. It is a feat of dexterity performed at high speed amid great danger.
Seven years ago, Max was breaking a lamb when the saw sliced between his fingers down to his wrist. A surgeon put his hand back together. Max shows me the scar extending through the length of his palm.
Max was 72 then. But not ready to retire. Now, however, he’s had enough.
He flicks through the photo roll on his phone, showing me images of the complex that he and Lorna have built for family in the Philippines, with an offshoot of apartments for paying guests. There are almost 100 steps up to their manor at the top of the hill.
As we wind down the chat, Max is held up by a well-wisher from another stall who has come to wish him good luck. Lorna stands beside Max, adjusting his beanie.
Max is tough and lean; all sinew and heart.
“He’s so strong,” Lorna says.
Paul Daffey’s weekly tours of the market and nearby laneways, called Journey to Dairy Hall, begin on Thursday 8 January. Book here.
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