goths of 90s and 2000s melbourne

(aka the kind of post that reminds folks that the owner of this blog is autistic)

by avalon 02.09.2026

this post is really a little library of lost links to lost places: it’s a way for me to bookmark the past and return to it when i like! old links and ancient pics live in these bookmarks. i’ll probably mark posts like this ‘digital garden’ or something.

i get pretty excited when i find digital remnants - little traces of online evidence of things that existed a bit before my time.

so ofc when i found that there used to be a place called Mortisha’s in my city in the 90s, i had to go hunting!

and it took a while, because it turns out that the spelling of the OG shop really is Mortisha and not…however people have spelt it here lol

OG source of this image is over here - and ugh it took AGES to find because this store was from the 90s and it’s so hard to find digital trails of anything from that long ago!

i also absolutely love that the mannequins are fully gothed up, i suspect i would have loved it back in the day ^^

the owner, hilary willowsmith, in 2021 - probably almost two decades after closing down her store! looks like she’s still a badass! source: insta

i actually doubt anyone else will care all that much but idk, i’m a bit of an internet archaeologist and i like history. i like old places. i like the idea that there used to be this weird old shop in my city, and i like wondering about the people who once went there.

i did a little bit more digging and found this 23 year old newspaper article - published the day before i turned 11, apparently - where they interviewed the owner of Mortisha’s and a bunch of other goths.

and it references another place called Gown of Thorns, which apparently existed until 2007 in fitzroy (unsurprising, if you know melbourne at all - it’s one of our most alternative/queer/hipster inner suburbs). and gown of thorns apparently made their own clothing.

dude. i would LOVE for there to still be made-in-melbourne goth clothing. 😭

a bit more searching and…i found a livejournal for gown of thorns that is somehow still up.

a LIVEJOURNAL. plenty of places had a myspace in the mid-late 2000s but i’ve def never seen livejournal of all places being used to advertise.

my guess is it’s because that’s where a lot of alt folks hung out. my memory is that lj was kind of a tumblr before tumblr, with a lot of the same kind of fandom and subculture stuff.

like…i know it’s just a black background, white text and pink links. but a whole list of posts like this just kind of convey a vibe of some kind, y’know? if i ever found a brick-and-mortar store whose social media was this, i’d want to go!

then that led me onto another livejournal entry all about goth nightclubs from 2004 - including a very vampy-sounding placed called Carmilla’s!

i wrote a while back about how romantigoth was pretty popular alongside the more punk sort of goth looks - pretty cool to see that in action here!

it looks like the goth scene in melbourne was pretty busy back in the day, with weekly goth nights at several different locations.

idk why this is so fascinating to me, but it is!

there still are goth nights in melbs - most notably elysium and new order - but i think they’re only once a month. it’s been a while since i last went to one, but digging up all these old pics is making me want to go again!

there are also shops from my own time as a babybat in the early 2010s that are all gone now 😭 i’m tossing in some random links to remaining bits of digital trail for them, even though the stores are long gone!

peril underground, which is still a tattoo shop now, but which used to feature an eclectic mix of new and old goth clothing, accessories designed by local makers, and records and CDs.

to get there, you had to pick your way down a steep-ass set of stairs that i’m sure were an actual hazard (i remember climbing down there in boots and a long skirt at 19 and i’m surprised i didn’t break my neck tbh)

downtown revolution, which stocked mostly rockabilly stuff, but also demonia, new rocks and others. they closed down probably a decade ago. the owner has also had a shop called pegasus with demonias and other cool boots since absolutely foreverrr and that one is still open at fountain gate in the southeast suburbs.

clear iT, yes with that spelling, which was not strictly goth but had a HUGE two floors’ worth of off-season dangerfield for a fraction of the usual cost. (dangerfield is the closest we aussies have to something like the US’s hot topic.) at one point, my wardrobe was probably more than half $30 dangerfield dresses scored from rummaging around in that messy warehouse. 😅

victorian gothic, also called vic gothic - and that was THE place to go if you were a goth in melbourne. folks would even come in from interstate to shop there. it had the biggest stock of clothing and accessories available, and you could grab tix to goth club events at the counter! that one closed down around the 2020 lockdowns. :( though i do believe they’d been planning to close even before the plague hit.

as much as i love the convenience of online shopping, there really is something to be said about the brick-and-mortar alternative store experience. even just getting to see other folks who look like you can be kinda nice and foster that sense of community.

(i remember when i was 19, my friends and i were walking down brunswick street and saw a few black-clad punky looking folks coming in the opposite direction - they asked whether we’d just come from Vic Gothic and asked for directions. haha teenage me was STOKED that these cool people knew we were in their scene! meant i’d struck the perfect eyeliner balance. 😆)

aaaand babybat me lol, 19 yo - probably not long after the above incident!

so there you have it: a random collection of info about stores, nightclubs and actual goths from the old internet in one specific australian city lol.