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The last picture house in Brunswick

The Liberty Theatre building occupies a special place in Brunswick’s history.

According to Ben Abbott, who wrote a university thesis about the heritage building, it first opened in the 1920s as the Broadway Dancing Palais, and was converted into a cinema seating 700 in 1935. During the golden age of Hollywood, it was one of up to a dozen large cinemas operating in the Brunswick area.

It was renovated at the cost of 4000 pounds in 1938 to adopt a hybrid Egyptian-Art Deco design and fought off the advent of television in the 1950s by catering to newly arrived Italian and Greek migrants settling in Brunswick as the renamed Teatro Moderno.

It was revamped again in 1973 as The Galaxy Cinema, showing soft-core pornography and martial arts films.

Renowned film critic Paul Harris of 3RRR’s Film Buff’s Forecast fame was the cinema’s final operator, acquiring the lease in 1986 and showing art house and independent features such as Repo Man and Blood Simple before it closed at the end of 1987.

Contributed by Greg Lynch -