Head to a far-flung industrial park for prized European smallgoods

In Brisbane Times’ Heartlands series, Food and Culture Editor Matt Shea seeks out the migrant restaurants, cafes and stores that give the city’s scene its rich texture. This month, an iconic smallgoods shop in an industrial park in the deep south-west.

If you haven’t heard of Adam’s Continental Smallgoods, there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of Carole Park either.

Head west out of the city, through Toowong, Indooroopilly, and onto the M5. Follow the highway until you get to Wacol, then turn onto Boundary Road. Follow it over the M2, and you’ve arrived in Carole Park, population eight.

Boundary Road continues on for what feels like forever, before doglegging into Cobalt Street. Follow it to the end, past the industrial warehouses and engineering shops and look for the towering “STOP” sign on the left. This is Adam’s Continental Smallgoods.

“When we first came, there was nothing here, it was the end of the road,” Margaret Markovich says about the time she and husband Adam inspected a vacant lot. “There was a factory over the road, a masonry business next door, and the army over the back fence.”

“What we do here, with the cooking and curing and smoking going on, you can’t be in a shopping centre,” adds Adam Markovich jnr, who’s in charge of the day-to-day running of the shop. “And then you have the high rent. They wanted to own the property, and this seemed like an affordable option.”

Back in 1984, it took Margaret and Adam snr two weeks to clear the land before they built a butchering and smoking facility with a small shopfront.

The Greenbank Military Range is still over the back fence, but now the road turns right and continues on to more recently built residential neighbourhoods. The shop has changed too, with the Markoviches expanding to add a new retail section to the front of the butchery and smokehouse.

It might be in the middle of proverbial nowhere, but early on a Friday morning in February, Adam’s Continental Smallgoods is packed with customers getting a head start on their weekend shop.

They take a number before perusing an enormous refrigerated counter that runs the length of two walls and is crammed full of everything from leberkase to kransky, weisswurst and continental frankfurts. There’s an enormous cheese section and a sandwich station down the far end.

In front of the counter are aisles stacked high with hard-to-find imported pantry goods: Nova gherkins from the Czech Republic, Carnex liver pate from Serbia, Delamaris tinned mackerel from Slovenia, and so on.

Through a door behind the back counter you can see staff in aprons and gumboots in the warehouse, working around a central cutting table, or gliding between the cool room and the smoking room, carrying cuts of meat or sometimes whole carcasses over their shoulder.

“This is actually the quiet time of year, after the holidays,” Adam jnr says, despite the activity.

Margaret and Adam snr migrated from their native Croatia via Canada in 1981 and noticed that, despite the high quality of beef, lamb and pork that was available in Australia, there was a lack of quality smallgoods in Brisbane’s markets.

The Markoviches worked as contract cleaners but always had in the back of their minds the idea of opening a smallgoods shop.

“But we had a lack of funds, and we were in new surroundings,” Margaret says. “So we took those jobs while we were building this so we had the income.”

When the Markoviches opened Adam’s, things were initially quiet.

“It would be just the two of us, making sausages,” Margaret says. “We’d open at 7am. I used to hear the door bang and I would run out, but it was just the next door neighbour – ‘Oh, it’s only Peter’ – he would come by all the time to say hello.”

By Christmas, the shop was busy enough that the Markoviches couldn’t keep up with demand. Shortly afterwards, they hired their first employee. Soon, they were delivering to Woolworths and David Jones.

“We were in the David Jones deli section in Garden City,” Margaret says. “Which was good. It used to be pretty fancy.”

Now, Adam’s Continental Smallgoods has about 30 full-time staff, and over the years, many of Margaret and Adam snr’s children and grandchildren have worked in the store, including daughter Lucy Markovich and her daughter, Juliette Markovich, best known as the former head chef of the award-winning Gerard’s on James Street. Adam jnr’s son, Anthony, works full-time in the shop.

“Thirty-five years ago, say, it was 85 per cent Croatian, Macedonian and Serbian customers,” Adam jnr says. “Now, it’s everyone: every nationality, every religion, everyone.

“The foodies come through to want to try things. So it continues to pick up a lot … and we can serve people whatever they want, whether it’s fresh meat, deli items, cheeses – one staff member will serve you all the way.”

On our way out of Adam’s, we run into Adam snr, now 87, enjoying a break at a trestle table in a shady corner of the car park. He’s chatting to a regular with a thick German accent who says he used to work next door.

It’s not Peter, it turns out, but he says he still comes to the store every week.

206 Cobalt Street, Carole Park, (07) 3271 3044