Gun dealer Mick Smith shuts shop to open escape for newlyweds
Daily Telegraph, Sydney
27 November 1998
After 54 years as Sydney's biggest gun dealer, Mick Smith has found the heart more lucrative than artillery.
The shop that once sold 6000 firearms and knives a year will now house the nation's first scheme hotel for honeymooners.
Where once you found racks of Rugers and Berettas, young couples will now carouse in the James Bond suite, the jungle room or the Elvis Presley parlour.
In less wary times, customers would test Mick's stock by taking a gun on to the George St footpath to aim at the Central station clock.
More than a few heads turned when Mick, 83, tested the sights of a 19th doubled-barrelled English hand cannon on the clock tower yesterday.
"People still like a shot," he said as passing traffic sounded horns.
"But the sport is not as popular as it once was.
"Forty years ago you could pull up in Bourke or Brewarrina and the farmers would say, 'Geez, can you help us get rid of the kangaroos and the pigs' it was open go. But with closer settlement the hunting grounds have shrunk a hell of a lot".
So, too, the market for guns has waned since with the Federal Government's $500 million gun buy-back scheme.
Mick's parting shot is directed as John Howard, "the boofhead bastard" he blames for cutting his turnover from 6000 guns a year to the 400 he sold in 1997.
''I cut my teeth on the gun business. It's sad to see it go.''
After a stint in the army, Mick became a Kings Cross barber in the early 40s.
"Kings Cross was Sydney…. It was a very exciting place. And when the Americans came the hairdressing business boomed out of sight.''
"The average Australian chap was paying tow shillings for a haircut. We could give the Americans the works for 25 shillings. I finished up with a shoeshine boy and three barbers going at the same time."
After selling 100 quid ($200) worth of .22 calibre bullets from his barbershop window in two days. Mick moved into guns and fishing tackle in 1944.
He soon had a staff of 21 selling wholesale to 800 retailers across the country.
But the 52 rooms in his building have been empty since he starting cutting staff during the 80s. Six months ago he decided the shop built in 1894 was ready to be a hotel again.
Montano property consultant Allan Brazel said 260,000 newly married couples visited Sydney each year. In tribute to Mick Smith and Sons Guns the 20-room hotel may well include a War Room or Big Game lounge.
Each room will have a ceiling of "twinkling stars" overlooking a 2m "super recliner" spa.
Mick and wife, Beth, 50, plan to travel to Europe before retiring to their Cronulla home where a working American Civil War cannon watches over the Georges River from the front yard.
"We might celebrate and fire it when all this is over," Mick said.
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