Qualla: Roxy Theatre and Peters Greek Cafe Complex

Roxy Theatre and Peters Greek Cafe Complex: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the night of Saturday, 28 March 1936, seven hundred people squeezed into a brand-new picture palace on Maitland Street, and hundreds more were turned away at the door. The local paper declared that probably no event in the history of Bingara had caused more excitement. On the screen flickered Roberta, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing through a glamour that felt impossibly far from this dusty wheat-and-cattle town near the Gwydir River. The men who built the Roxy were three immigrants from a small Greek island, and the triumph they were celebrating that night would, within months, slip through their fingers.

Image: Mattinbgn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roxy Theatre and Peters Greek Cafe Complex: Three Men From Kythera

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 3.0. They came from Kythera, a rocky island off the southern tip of Greece, and they arrived in Australia in the early 1920s carrying little but ambition. Peter Feros, nicknamed Katsehamos, and George Psaltis tried their luck in Bingara, buying a refreshment room from a fellow Greek a...

Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roxy Theatre and Peters Greek Cafe Complex: A Palace Named for New York

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unidentified, CC BY 4.0. The name was no accident. The original Roxy Theatre in New York, opened in 1927, was the largest movie palace on Earth, and these Greek-Australian showmen modelled their dream on it - the name, the glamour, the sense of occasion. What they built is a rectangular fantasy in the Ar...

Image: Unidentified | CC BY 4.0

Roxy Theatre and Peters Greek Cafe Complex: The Cinema War

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Glamour was not enough. A rival named Victor Peacocke had opened his plainer Regent Theatre in 1935, nine months before the Roxy was finished, and he used that head start ruthlessly. He slashed ticket prices; the Roxy partners had to match him. He installed an advanced sound syst...

Image: Mattinbgn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roxy Theatre and Peters Greek Cafe Complex: Forty Years of Silence, Then the Lights Again

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage Division, CC BY 4.0. Emanuel Aroney did not leave. He stayed in Bingara managing cafes for the next twenty years, while the picture-going boom that built the Roxy slowly faded. The theatre ran as a cinema until 1958, then fell dark, lying dormant for some forty years as television emptied country pic...

Image: Heritage Division | CC BY 4.0