The Melbourne department store of Buckley & Nunn first opened its doors in 1851 as a drapery store and, in its heyday, competed creditably with David Jones (1838) and Myer (1900). It occupied a succession of buildings in Bourke Street until being taken over by David Jones in 1982.[1][2]
Popular as a retailer of fashionable garments, its 1914 mail-order catalogue promoted elegant frocks. In 1939, female nightwear was shown in shop windows. In fact, similar displays had caused pedestrian congestion on the footpath from as early as 1912, seen in photos of the day. In the 1920s, the store's tea room was reputedly a fashionable meeting place for ladies.
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Buckley & Nunn was co-founded by Mars Buckley (1825?–1905), a businessman who was born at Mallow, County Cork, Ireland and emigrated to Victoria in 1851 with a wife and one child.[3] He began a drapery business in Bourke Street in 1852,[1] with a partner, Crumpton John Nunn (1828–1891).
In the twentieth century, the firm occupied two adjacent buildings on the north side of Bourke Street. The westerly one (numbers 306-12) was the Edwardian Baroque-style Buckley & Nunn Emporium, built in two stages in 1911 and 1912. The Buckley & Nunn Men's Store (numbers 298-304) was designed by the same local architects Bates, Smart & McCutcheon and completed in 1934.[1]
The newer Moderne or art-deco-style building constructed in 1933-1934 was an architectural triumph which won the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects' Street Architecture Medal in 1934, being "a distinct departure from the traditional and thus exemplary of the modern trend in design".[4] It was decorated with male bas-relief figures in jazz-age costume, glazed terracotta panels and spandrels faced with stainless-steel chevrons and colourful musical-note symbols. The National Trust has described the lift cars and lobbies as "unequalled in Victoria as examples of the European 'Art Deco' geometric forms which dominated decorative art in the 1930s".[4]
The origin of the Australian slang term "Buckley's chance" (meaning "little or no possibility" or "no chance at all") has been explained as rhyming slang, viz, "Buckley and Nunn" (meaning "None"); and as a punning reference ("You've two chances: Buckley's and none").[5] Australians in states other than Victoria generally believe the idiom derives from the adventures of escaped colonial convict, William Buckley.
This term is often mistakenly thought to have been derived from a punning reference to the Melbourne department store Buckley's & Nunn — 'you have two chances, Buckley's and none'. But this is definitively disproven by records of the saying being used pre-dating the establishment of this store. First recorded use of this was in 1837(shortly after the escape of Willaim Buckley the convict) by Trevor Johnson, a local merchant born in Heligoland who used it in reply to a local constable from the Bellerine shire demanding he admit his wrong doing in regards to a sale of questionable goods.